On Friday, 26 Sep 2008, John Buono reviewed MacGourmet Deluxe 1.03 for the Macintosh. MacGourmet Deluxe is software and is made by Mariner Software. MacGourmet Deluxe is a(n) personal productivity product which "Maintains your collection of recipes, determine recipe scaling, nuturition, meal planning, shopping list, and cook book creation". John Buono gave it an overall rating of 6, Good , with a required skill level of 2, Very Easy To Use. (Note: All ratings on this page are based upon a seven point scale.) John Buono will use it at Home and would recommend it to friends, coworkers, and family members. John Buono had the following special comments to make about MacGourmet Deluxe:
Finally a recipe program that is not only easy to use, but keeps recipes so you can find them, and most importantly easily import them.
MacGourmet Deluxe is extremely easy to install and extremely easy to configure. MacGourmet Deluxe is very easy to use. The documentation is very good.
John Buono thought the top 5 points about MacGourmet Deluxe were:
- Recipes found on most websites can be easily imported with a single menu selection
- Any recipe that can be text selected can be imported with little effort
- Meal planning is by calendar, so you can plan meals days, weeks, or months in advance
- recipes can be input by hand easily, with little effort
- Shopping lists can be quickly and easily created and ingredient consolidated
John Buono had the following special good comments to make about MacGourmet Deluxe:
I have tried numerous recipe programs trying to find one that actually worked like a person who cooks. Most make recipe creation very difficult, and once created very difficult to use. Finally I have found one that is very easy to use, makes creating recipes easy and fun. And has all the features i want, including one that is really slick.
This feature allows you to display a very large rendition of ingredients and direction on the screen, so that when you are preparing a recipe you can do it with out wearing reading glasses, a great plus and good reason to finally have a laptop in the kitchen.
Another nice feature is that you can generate a cook book with little effort. Yes that is right, a cook book, including title page, your own text pages, your recipes, picture, everything so you have a very nice gift for someone or finally a neat book for the kitchen if your spouse will not let you put a computer in the kitchen.
But the one feature that really impressed me was the shopping list. most programs just list out the ingredient for each recipe, but MacGourmet consolidates them together so you know if you need 5 lbs of sugar or a 1lb of sugar, instead of 30 sugar entries and you are trying to figure out how much total you need.
The importing feature is unique. It uses the seldom used but highly powerful services menu. Any program in which services have been activate, you can select text and import it into a recipe, and then just need to stipulate what portion if title, ingredients, directions, etc.
The web import also uses services but as long as the menu is in the proper format (and so far almost all are that i have used), the import is direct, and include an photo of the recipe.
The many feature of MacGourmet could go on for a while, and could be endless, it uses plug in technology so you can expand the product, or remove features you don't want.
I particularly liked the nutrition plug in, really shows what your recipes are all about, and is no effort. A major drawback of other programs, you had to input the nutritional information for each recipe, this one calculated it for you.
If you like to cook, have loads of recipes that need organization and own a Mac, then this is a program to seriously consider.
John Buono noted the following 3 negative point(s) about MacGourmet Deluxe:
- The text page editor for cook book has virtually no features, would prefer to be able to import pages
- You can't export your shopping list to iPhone, nor the iPhone shopping list program
- The shopping list needs to arrange by shopping order as an option.
John Buono had the following special negative comments to make about MacGourmet Deluxe:
I honestly thought for a while and these were the only bad points; this is a great program
John Buono had the following overall observations to make about MacGourmet Deluxe:
For $44.95 this is a great program. Oh - I forgot to mention that it also manages your wine collection, but I have not even used that one yet.
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Date Revised: 25 October 2005
