Have you ever had your recipe snippets misplaced in a cluttered room? Have you ever wished if you could search through all the recipes you jotted down while watching Food Network or Fatafeet? Have you ever wanted to convert your measurements in a recipe to metric all at once without googling? Have you ever wished if you could reproduce your recipe as a PDF or via email? Have you ever wanted to categorize your recipes based on a certain ingredient? If the answer to the aforesaid questions is “yes,” then this article is for you.

As a self-proclaimed geek and as a programmer, I have a huge penchant for plain text files. In fact, I keep a panoply of notes on my laptop in plain text format. However, many people like to deal with notes or in our case, recipes, in a streamlined manner. Many prefer to just throw their notes at the application and let it do the rest for them. Hence, I will try introduce a few solutions below that could address this problem.

There are quite a handful of softwares out there that you could use on the Mac to store, organize, and categorize recipes. However, for the sake of this blogpost, I have picked two of the most popular applications both of which can be purchased from the Mac App Store in a breeze. I would be giving you a brief summary of their basic features throughout this post. The main criteria I will be basing my review on are: ease of use at recipe entry, shopping list creation, importing recipes from websites, and ease of use while cooking.

YummySoup! — $15

YummySoup is one of the popular and feature-packed recipe management tools that I am sure would come in handy for Mac-using foodies. Overall, the application is user-friendly and should provide you enough bang for the buck. YummySoup is quite user-friendly and well-designed but I would say it still has room for improvement.

Ease of use at recipe entry:

It is pretty simple and straightforward to add recipes to YummySoup. All you have to do is click on the + sign beneath the recipe list and you are good to go. One thing that I do not quite find user-friendly is the fact that all the fields are laid down onto one screen without proper categorization. Some users may actually like it but at first sight I personally got caught off guard by the number of fields I had to fill up in one shot.

Shopping list creation:

YummySoup lets you create grocery lists and makes it easy for you to create a printable list of groceries that you can carry with you as you make the trip to Carrefour or any other grocery store to purchase them. I found this task effortless to carry out, first you have to create a grocery list, soon after, you drag a recipe of your choice from the recipe list to the grocery list you just created. You can select the grocery list you created and check or uncheck the ingredients you need to buy in the Consolidated view. You also have the option of adding your own needed items in the “My Entries” tab.

Importing recipes from websites:

One of the innovative features of YummySoup is the “Web Importer tool” which would allow you to import recipes from any website into the application. Upon activating the “Web Importer tool,” you are presented with an in-app web browser. You could visit one of listed websites to import your favorite recipes from, in a click of a button. Alternatively, if you woud like to import recipes from a different website, you could use the highlight method. This feature lets you manually highlight various parts (e.g. ingredients, directions, etc.) of a recipe using the provided buttons and have the recipe added to your list appropriately.

Ease of use while cooking:

YummySoup does not come equipped with a dedicated feature to let you have a quick glance at the directions while cooking. However, you could trigger the full-screen mode by hitting Command + Option + F, this would result in the application filling up your whole screen taking advantage of the maximum screen real estate. YummySoup also lets you print out your recipes, in case, you choose to have a print-out with you handy while cooking or even if you choose to share it with friends.

MacGourmet — $25

As far as recipe collection softwares go, MacGourmet is bar none one of the best applications out there with a quite large user-base and an extensive support for plug-ins. One thing that sets MacGourmet apart from YummySoup is its iPhone and iPad companions. You could use the MacGourmet app on the iPhone optionr iPad to sync your shopping lists and recipes with the app and carry it with you where ever you go. What’s more, MacGourmet also can provide you with nutritional information with an optional plug-in using the latest USDA database. This way you could determine how many calories a meal will have before you start cooking it.

Ease of use at recipe entry:

MacGourmet is quite well-tailored when it comes to recipe entry. You could initiate the recipe entry process by clicking the green + sign in the toolbar and this will bring up a dialog box with plethora of different fields all nicely placed and categorized based on their type.

Shopping list creation:

Pretty much similar to YummySoup creating a shopping list based on a recipe is as simple as dragging a particular recipe into the “Shopping List” section. This will create a new shopping list in the aforesaid section and you have the option of editing that shopping list based on what you have on hand and what you lack. I personally found MacGourmet better in shopping list creation than its other counterpart, YummySoup.

Importing recipes from websites:

Unlike YummySoup, MacGourmet seems less clear-cut in importing recipes and the process, in general, is a little bit labyrinthine in the beginning. You could use any browser to import recipes to MacGourmet. The main limitation of the application is that you can only import recipes from websites that are already recognized by MacGourmet. Consequently, if a website is not recognized by the application, you will have to use the clippings feature to save a particular recipe in MacGourmet and then, if you please, manually add it to the recipes list later on.

Ease of use while cooking:

MacGourmet comes with a feature called “Chef View” which strips a recipes off of all the bells and whistles and presents you with a text-only version of ingredients and directions laid down on a black background reminiscent of teleprompters. One of the distinctive features of the “Chef View” is that the currently active recipe can be read out loud to you while you prepare the ingredients or while you are cooking.

Conclusion

There you have it. Both YummySoup and MacGourmet should provide you with ample features to help you go green and turn your otherwise lost recipes into electronic format. These tools should give recipe management a whole new meaning once you grow accustomed to them.

I hope this blogpost proves beneficial to all of you. Please feel free to ask me any question in the comments.

Photo by ericaelannelson/Flickr — http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericaelannelson/6025184115/

I thought I'd do a rundown of various new features (including obscure ones) being introduced in iOS 5 that I really like.

• Get a week view in calendar app by rotating your iPhone into landscape mode.
• Drag and drop events in calendar app while on week view.
• Customize alert style of individual apps in Notification center.
• Enable LED flash for alerts.
• Customize notification tones for email, text message, and so on.
• Delete individual calls from your iPhone call log.
• Open camera app from Lock screen by double-tapping the home button.
• Take pictures using volume-up button or Apple’s headphone remote.
• Capture photos and have them appear in iPhoto, without syncing, using Photo Stream
• Swipe left on camera app to enter camera roll and swipe right to return.
• Create photo albums on the fly.
• Delete songs in Music app.
• Select and mark multiple emails as read.
• Compose rich-text messages in Mail app.
• Move an email address in Mail app’s compose screen without retyping.
• Hide the keyboard in Messages app by scrolling down.
• Sync your iPhone wirelessly.
• Use your iPhone while it’s being synced.
• Save web pages on the reading list in Safari.
• Tap on the reader button in Safari to get a clean version of an article.
• Define words using built-in dictionary anywhere.

1. First and foremost make sure you’ve installed all the recent updates on your Mac by running Software Update.

2. Backup and transfer all your purchases by syncing your iPhone in iTunes.

3. Organize your home screen and get rid of unused apps.

4. Gather your friend’s Apple ID addresses and update their contact profiles so that you can iMessage them.

5. Last but not least get intimate with the new 200 features being introduced in iOS 5 by visiting Apple’s website.

One complaint I often hear from iPhone users is that they cannot use their iPhones in Disk Mode. Complain no more, iPhone Explorer an application available for both Mac and Windows lets you use your iPhone as a thumbdrive. The good news is that you don't need to hack your iPhone to get that functionality.

iPhone Explorer

Looking for a minimal and less dull start page for your browser. Try Fav4.org.

Fav4.org