MacGourmet 2 is finally ready for a closed-beta, and I'm looking for people who'd be interested in giving it a whirl before the beta goes public. What's required? You must be comfortable backing up your old MacGourmet database, and must be willing to use the beta like you use the current version realizing, though, that you could lose changes made during testing. This is an early beta after all.
I really need testers with the following characteristics or for the following areas:
- People with medium to large databases to test migration to the new database format.
- People who are interested in .Mac publishing, and have done it before in the past.
- People who are interested in scaling, and know what to look for when the scaled values are wrong.
- People who are interested in english to metric conversions and know what to look for when the conversions are wrong.
If you are interested, just use the "Send Feedback" menu item in the MacGourmet Help menu or use this link:
macgourmet [at] advenio.com, to send an email to support asking to be added as a tester, stating the number of recipes in your database and what area you'd be likely to focus on. I expect to start the closed-beta in about a week, after I finish closing some outstanding bugs.
With that out of the way, here's some more preview stuff:
Here's a look at the new icon, created by Jordan Langille of
OneToad Design:
Next up is a full shot of the new, cleaner and sleeker main window:
(Click to see a bigger version of the image)
The template being used to display recipes in the screenshot is called Bulletin, and it is accompanied by a bunch of new display templates that make your recipe box look a lot more colorful and fun.
Finally here is another preview of some more of the new version 2 features:
Database List editorYou can now explore and edit the values in your database easily with the new database list editor. This new tool allows you to modify ingredients and other pieces of information globally, to see what items in your database use, say, a certain ingredient, and to add new categories, equipment, etc. Double-clicking on an item in the "Used By" list at the bottom will bring you to the item in your recipe box.
(Click to see a bigger version of the image)
CategoriesRecipes now have a list of categories to pick from to make things like grouping and searching easier. In addition to the built-in standard set, you can add and remove your own categories in the database list editor.
EquipmentYou can also now easily add any special equipment required to a recipe's information. In addition to the built-in standard set, you can add and remove your own equipment in the database list editor.
Blog posterI added this more for myself, I use it to post to MacGourmet.com and to the new MacGourmet featured lists that are displayed within the application, but I thought others might find this useful as well. If you have or want to start a new food blog, and the blog service provider uses Atom for it's syndication and publishing API (i.e. Blogger, MovableType), you can use the new Blog tool to post recipes to your blog, with formatting, images and download files. It's not meant to be a full blog editor by any means, but I've found it really useful to put recipes into my blogs using MacGourmet rather than typing them in by hand.
Oh and one final note to localizers, I should finally be getting to the point where I can generate the files necessary for localization at the same time as the beta. During testing I found myself making some language changes, and I've been holding off starting a localization effort until the text in the application was no longer changing.
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