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:
- Connoisseur 1.1.7 (great interface)
- A Cook's Books 0.9.19 (feature rich)
- Shop'NCook 3.1 (includes nutritional database)
- Organized Gourmet 1.2 (calendar based meal planning)
- MacGourmet 1.1.7 (attractive interface, includes wine notes)
- iCuistot 1.1.1 (includes nutritional database — sort of)
- Kitchen 1.0 (simple interface)
- Yum 0.7.8 (simple recipe manager)
- Measuring Cup 1.1.1 (simple interface)
- CookWare Deluxe 2.1 (includes a very basic meal planner)
- 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.
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:
Mathilde Rufenacht, developer of Shop'NCook
Reply to This
Wednesday, July 12 2006 @ 02:32 PM PDT