Recipe Manager Software for Macs

[Terila]

Not sure if this is the right area for this question ... but ...

I have most of my recipes that are on my computer in Mastercook Mac which is no longer being supported. In fact, Mastercook Mac will not work with OS X.

Does anyone have any experience with the various recipe software programs out there for Macs? And do you know if Mastercook Mac files can be imported?

Thanks!

[Maureen B. Fant]

I use Mac Gourmet, which does import MasterCook. macgourmet.com.

[Rover]

When I re-entered the Mac world last year, I purchased "Parallels Desktop For Mac" software. It runs a virtual PC through which I can access MasterCook. I'm really pleased with the performance of this application not least because I've worked with M/C for years and haven't found anything I like better.

I can recommend Parallels without reservation.

Rover

[SheenaGreena]

I had a really nasty virus on my pc that basically made it shit the bed. I switched over to a mac a few months ago and I absolutely love it, I couldn't ask for anything better. I don't know if I'd run a virtual pc on it though, because I am wondering if you can get pc viruses through it?

is there any other recipe manager software for a mac that's free?

[nduran]

It's not very elegant but I just use Yojimbo as a scrapbook kind of thing which is about as organized as I can be expected to get.

[Rover]

Well - Considering that the virus world travels through the internet, I seldom access the net from the "PC side" accomplishing all I need from the "Mac side".

I've been happily using my Mac (and Parallels) for a year now and haven't encountered any issues at all. It offers me the best of both worlds and I don't have to give up my beloved MasterCook - there really isn't anything comparable out there - I did look around.

Rover

I had a really nasty virus on my pc that basically made it shit the bed.  I switched over to a mac a few months ago and I absolutely love it, I couldn't ask for anything better.  I don't know if I'd run a virtual pc on it though, because I am wondering if you can get pc viruses through it? 

is there any other recipe manager software for a mac that's free?

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[DCP]

There are many, many recipe management tools for MacOS X - for example, see these search results from Versiontracker.com. Particularly well-rated are YummySoup! (From a former MasterCook user) and MacGourmet.

Personally, I settled on Measuring Cup for some time before deciding that I needed a cross-platform solution accessible from anywhere. I'm now using RecipeZaar with much success. Particularly, I like the automatic nutritional data calculations it offers.

Edited to add: nutritional data calculations from RecipeZaar.

Edited June 26, 2007 by DCP (log)

[paulraphael]

I'm curious to hear what these programs offer. A couple of years ago I started storing my recipes on the computer, but just as simple text files. This lets me print them out and scribble all over them and update them all the time, which is handy since I usually work on a recipe through quite a few versions before leaving it alone.

I suppose scaling tools would be handy, and a database would be handy if my recipe stash grew by a few hundred percent. I worry about what would happen to a database (any database) if the software stops being supported. Using a lowest common denominator format like text files is comforting for this reason.

Are there any other features/benefits I'm missing out on?

[edited to add]

If you sell me on the idea I'd definitely be curious to see what the best (and simplest) solutions are on the Mac. Including FileMaker templates ... are there any of these?

Edited June 26, 2007 by paulraphael (log)

[MarkIsCooking]

This scenario might fry your computer when you read it, but here goes. I've tried a bunch of recipe programs and haven't loved any of them. I put all my recipes in Microsoft Word or if need be - in PDF format. I realize that I can't get a nifty shopping list out of this system, but here's what I do get.

I get all my documents in the public folder on my .Mac account. So, all my recipes are always safe and stored on the Internet (no worries about computer crashes, lost files, etc.). I make sure that I title the documents in a way that helps me find stuff by doing simple searches (i.e. Chocolate or Shrimp or whatever).

The other benefit of this system is that I can access my recipes from any web browser AND I can easily keep my recipes where anybody can find them. Say I have people over to dinner and they just LOVE my braised beef dish. "Grab the recipe off my website," I say.

Are you techies still alive after hearing my VERY simple approach???

By the way, if you want to see it in action, just go to MarkCooks.com and click on the RECIPES page.

-Mark-

[opqdan]

Not an answer to the OP, but a related question:

In January I started working on a cookbook application that my wife (then fiancee) and I could use to keep track of all of our cooking. I'm a programmer, but I only work on the cookbook stuff during my free time which isn't much considering that I have: graduated from college, got married, moved 2500 miles, and started a job all since then. It is still in the alpha stages, but it is slowly coming together.

I hope you guys don't mind, but I'd like to use your suggestions for what makes a good recipe storage application, please let me know if you have more. My wife and I are the primary customers for my app, but if I feel it is good enough, I will be releasing it for free (open source to boot). It is designed with a server/multiple client setup in mind, so you could access it from any other computer that had network access, and it would be completely cross-platform (a web application that you would view in your browser, with Ruby On Rails on the server)

I've already figured on nutrition information (from the USDA database), and unit conversions/scaling. And I am trying to make the recipe input as intuitive as possible (though I am by no means a UI designer). I would love to be able to parse flat text so that I could copy and paste text from a webpage, but there are so many different styles to writting ingredients, that I don't know if it will happen.

If making my own were not so much fun, I would be using Big Oven, which seems to have a lot of nice features, but I don't think that they have a Mac version.

Edited to add:

...

Hmm, I think that my program has a very similar goal, to allow recipe access from any other PC through a web browser (just on your home network, or across the whole web if you wanted).

Edited June 26, 2007 by opqdan (log)

[Terila]

The other benefit of this system is that I can access my recipes from any web browser AND I can easily keep my recipes where anybody can find them.  Say I have people over to dinner and they just LOVE my braised beef dish.  "Grab the recipe off my website," I say.

Are you techies still alive after hearing my VERY simple approach???

By the way, if you want to see it in action, just go to MarkCooks.com and click on the RECIPES page.

-Mark-

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Wow, thanks for letting us see the way that you save your recipes.

I liked MastercookMac mostly for the search functions. I did not care about scaling, shopping lists or nutritional information which they also had. But being able to do to the pantry and decide I wanted to use up an inghredient I could go to Mastercook and put that ingredient in ... it would tell me all the recipes that used that ingredient even if the name was not in the title.

I liked YummySoup for the simple interface but I personally did not see that it imported MastercookMac files. I'll have to check again. Other contenders were MacGourmet and A Cook's Books, both of which do import.

Mark ... do you have lots of recipes in this format? I have thousands and, now that I have no formal recipe manager I just cut and paste the recipe into a simple text file ... no special formating which you have!!!

I do have Appleworks database and there is one very simple [too simple] database for recipes ... I do not know about Filemaker templates.