MacGourmet touch: Your Entire Recipe Collection In Your Pocket
Written by Kevin Fordham
In my household, my wife and I have a little bit of a role reversal. I’m often the cook in the home and my wife often helps with the yard work. While we don’t have the “traditional” household roles, our arrangement works for us. I really enjoy cooking and to help manage my recipe collection, I use the great recipe management software, MacGourmet.
I was recently a beta tester for the new MacGourmet companion application, MacGourmet touch. MacGourmet touch allows you to carry around your entire MacGourmet database on your iPhone. My review is based on MacGourmet touch RC1, which is very similar to the 1.0 release of the application.
After purchasing MacGourmet touch (iTunes link), open up both MacGourmet on your Mac and iPhone. Head to the sync section in MacGourmet touch and provided your Mac and iPhone are on the same network, you should see your Mac listed. Tap the name of your Mac and watch your recipes, wine notes, cooking notes, and shopping lists sync to your iPhone.
After syncing, you can browse through your recipe collection just as you do with your music collection. You can easily add recipes to your shopping list which is helpful when you go to the grocery store. As you purchase the ingredients, just tap the ingredient name and it will mark it as purchased.
While MacGourmet touch is a very good iPhone application, there are a few features I’d love to see. Currently, you can only add entire recipes to your shopping lists. I’d like to see the ability to select individual ingredients from a recipe. It’s very rare that I need to buy every ingredient for a recipe. I’d also love to see the a mechanism to easily email a recipe to someone. If you’re at a party and someone asks for that bean dip recipe, it would be very helpful to go ahead and email it to them while you’re still at the party.
If you already own the desktop version of MacGourmet, MacGourmet touch is a killer addition for your iPhone. If your are ever at the grocery store and suddenly think of the perfect meal, you’ll have everything you need to shop right on your iPhone.
MacGourmet touch is $4.99 and requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
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June 28th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Sync doesn’t work for me. MacBook Pro, MacOS 10.5.7, MacGourmet 2.3 with no plug-ins, iPod Touch v. 3.0. Both the MacBook and the iPod are connected to the same wi-fi network and both can use Safari, send and receive email, etc., so they are both functioning with the network properly. However, when I have both MacGourmet and MacGourmet Touch open and try to sync using the sync button on the iPod Touch, I get a continuous “Searching for servers” message on the iPod and no connection ever takes place.
William
July 3rd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Have you tried contacting the developer? In my dealings with him he seems very responsive.
November 23rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Sync is definitely hit or miss with me, as well. I usually get the “searching for servers” message and haven’t been able to distinguish any differences between my setup when my mac actually does show up and sync.
Love the software… just want to get it to sync on a regular basis. :-P
November 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Oh, one more thing… it would be nice to have a search feature in case you can’t remember the exact name of your recipe.
January 9th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
[...] MacGourmet touch Released I love to cook (and eat), but I was a little shocked to see this post about MacGourmet touch being released was the most popular post written in 2009. I use MacGourmet on Mac every week, but I never got around to purchasing MacGourmet touch. That will change in 2010 as I wished I had my recipe collection with me at the grocery store several times last year. [...]
April 14th, 2010 at 11:16 pm
Sync doesn’t work for me either.
December 26th, 2010 at 9:31 am
For those of you who stumble upon this while trying to find
out why your app on the iphone/ipod touch/ipad won’t sync because
it can’t find any servers, try this: 1. Start up MacGourmet on your
computer. (Answer given using version 3.0.3) 2. Open MacGourmet
> Preferences 3. Select iPhone 4. Click on the “Enable
sharing at start up” box. Close and restart MacGourmet. Then open
your MacGourmet App and you should finally see your computer. Hope
this helps!
December 29th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
Still can’t get mine to sync…bummer…would be nice but
can’t get it to work. Like the program overall especially with the
Mealplan option. The few glitches I’ve found are making it a bit of
a challenge to work with though. Any other tips on how to get it to
sync, would be great! Thanks!
December 31st, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Make sure nothing else on your network is syncing at the same time you try to sync MacGourmet. With a different application, I noticed it wouldn’t sync when iTunes was syncing content with my original Apple TV. Stop all the network traffic on your wireless network and see if that helps. Worth a shot if nothing else is working for you.