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Shop'NCook Home

smart recipe & grocery list organizer

Version:  3.4.3

   [ Views: 1005 ]

Includes nutritional database (Review and product comparison)

Feedback Type:  Review

Contributed by: kalsta Tuesday, April 25 2006 @ 09:05 AM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Less than a month

Recommend Product: YES

Good:

  • Nutritional database linked to ingredients
  • Individual serve scaling
  • Logical shopping list feature
  • Filter by category

Bad:

  • Fairly unattractive interface
  • Individual serve scaling is temporary and doesn't show up in main recipe window
  • Lacks more advanced filtering/classification
  • Not obvious how to add recipe ingredients to shopping list (although it's there)
  • No weekly meal planner
  • Shopping list doesn't remind you which recipes you've selected

Shop'NCook is one of the better recipe programs I have tested. I would probably rate Connoisseur and A Cook's Books higher, but only just and for different reasons: Connoisseur is less feature rich but has the most user-friendly interface, and A Cook's Books has the most features. Organized Gourmet is another good option if meal planning is more important to you.

The programs I tested, roughly in order of preference were:

  1. Connoisseur 1.1.7 (great interface)
  2. A Cook's Books 0.9.19 (feature rich)
  3. Shop'NCook 3.1 (includes nutritional database)
  4. Organized Gourmet 1.2 (calendar based meal planning)
  5. MacGourmet 1.1.7 (attractive interface, includes wine notes)
  6. iCuistot 1.1.1 (includes nutritional database — sort of)
  7. Kitchen 1.0 (simple interface)
  8. Yum 0.7.8 (simple recipe manager)
  9. Measuring Cup 1.1.1 (simple interface)
  10. CookWare Deluxe 2.1 (includes a very basic meal planner)
  11. The Computer Cookbook 3.1

Note: There are many others that I didn't test at all because they looked less promising, based on their descriptions and other people's reviews. There is one commercial product (TheRecipeManager) I refuse to test because of the developer's crazy policy of buy before you try. While I have tried to give a fair and honest appraisal of each product, I don't pretend that each review is exhaustive or totally without error. If I have overlooked any feature, it's possibly an indication that the feature was difficult to find or unintuitive to use — so in any case the reviews are a valid record of my opinion and individual experience.

  
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Comments

2 comments |

Includes nutritional database (Review and product comparison) - Mathilde_Rufenacht_801

Thank you for this fair review of Shop'NCook. I have taken several of your comments into account to improve the new release, version 3.4:

  • Interface: you have to realize that most recipe software list the ingredients in a table separately from the recipe instructions. That makes for a tidy interface, but unfortunately forces the users to reorganize their recipes to fit this strict format. Shop'NCook allows to mix ingredients and instructions in the way of many cookbooks that list the ingredients when they are needed in the recipe (see The Joy of Cooking for example). In version 3.4, the recipe wizard directly interprets text recipes in mixed format. It recognizes automatically the ingredient lines and links them with the nutritional information - no formatting or tedious hand-linking is necessary.
  • Recipe scaling: I have added a powerful scaling tool that can even scale the text of the recipes (not just the list of ingredients), make unit conversions and ingredient substitutions. The user can display the scaled recipes in separate windows.
  • Recipe classification: each recipe can be classified into several user-defined categories. In addition, recipes can now be cross-linked.
  • Shopping list: Shop'NCook itemizes the ingredient quantities per recipe in the shopping list. The software had this option all along, but you had to enable it in the preferences. Now, it is selected by default. In addition, the recipe name and number of servings are written in the main shopping list comment.

Mathilde Rufenacht, developer of Shop'NCook

Reply to This

Wednesday, July 12 2006 @ 02:32 PM PDT


Includes nutritional database (Review and product comparison) - kalsta

Thanks Mathilde — I'll check out the new version when I get a chance.

BTW, I've discovered that writing anything less than a perfect review on VersionTracker often earns you a condescending response from the developer, so it's refreshing to hear from developers like yourself who are more open to feedback!

Reply to This

Tuesday, November 21 2006 @ 11:01 PM PST