MacGourmet News

As a teaser for those people who will be picking up iPhones today, or shortly thereafter, the next MacGourmet update (2.1.4, due hopefully at the beginning of July) will only be a minor fix update, but it will include some support for viewing recipes, notes and, yes, shopping lists published to your .Mac accounts on the iPhone. I've made a new iPhone-specific theme for publishing, and once I can test it on an actual iPhone, I'll make it available here.

Getting content on your phone should be easy, using the recipe and note publishing that is already part of MacGourmet (if you don't have .Mac, and want to try it, sign up though this link and Advenio gets a commission). You'll just need to download and add the iPhone theme (once available) that was designed specifically for viewing content on the iPhone screen, publish your selections to your .Mac account, and bookmark the pages in the iPhone web browser. Simple. The photo to the right gives you some idea of what things should look like, using an "iPhone emulator" named iPhoney.

This is just a start and a quick way to have some recipe and shopping list support for the iPhone, but I'll be looking at even more ways of supporting the iPhone, so stay tuned!

A lot of this information is in the user guide, specifically in the appendix at the end, but because I know a lot of people don't read documentation, I thought I'd take this time to post some useful information here about your MacGourmet library.

Your library is stored in a database file named MacGourmetDatabase and this file has a file extension of .mgdatabase. This file is located in the folder you specified the first time you ran MacGourmet or when you upgraded from a version 1 library. Normally this location is your Documents folder, so in your Documents folder there should be a file named MacGourmetDatabase.mgdatabase. This file contains all of your data, including your recipes, images, etc. You can't import this file using File > "Import..." in the application. Import is intended for importing files from other applications, and files you have explicitly exported from MacGourmet (.mgourmet files).

You should never move this file, ESPECIALLY while the application is running. You can't open the database file by double-clicking on it (well you sort of can, in that MacGourmet will start up, but this isn't recommended). MacGourmet expects the database to always be in the same location, and it always loads it when it starts up. If for some reason you do want to move it, you should make a copy of your database in the new location, make sure the file is named correctly, and change the database location in Preferences > Advanced. If for some reason you start MacGourmet and it can't find your database file when it should find it, you should choose the Quit option and contact support. There are so many checks and data safeguards in the product though, that this should never happen.

When you upgrade MacGourmet, you should never have to do anything to your database file. All you need to do is copy the new version of MacGourmet to your hard drive (usually your Applications folder) replacing the existing version. That's it.

You should backup your MacGourmetDatabase file often. You should at the very least make a copy of this file somewhere once in a while, especially after you've made a lot of changes. It's best to do an "off machine" backup though, to say .Mac or a CD or external backup drive. You'd be amazed at how many people have their hard drives fail on them (I know because they write to ask for their serial number, which BTW you can get by going to the online store and entering your email address). You can also have your computer stolen, even from your home (it's actually happened to me). So if you can make a copy that is stored on something other than your drive, your data will be that much safer (Go ahead, make a backup now if you haven't lately).

Some people have also asked about files found by Spotlight in Library/MacGourmet/MetaData. These files are purely there so that Spotlight can find recipes in your database. These are not your recipes though. They are index files that point to recipes in your database.

Finally, there is a way to open a database other than your normal, default database. You can do this by holding down the option key on your keyboard when MacGourmet is starting up. When you do this, you will be given the option to choose a database file. This is useful for me during development and testing, but it can also be used to, for example, open a backup copy of your database, or a database you create for a specific purpose (for instance, testing a bunch of imports). How do you make another database? Well the easiest way is to make a copy of your current database, and rename the copy, say from MacGourmetDatabase.mgdatabase to MyTestDatabase.mgdatabase (note you MUST have a .mgdatabase file extension).

There you have it, some in-depth information on your MacGourmet library. Hopefully you found this information useful.

Labels: Helpful Hints

MacGourmet 2.1.3, another maintenance release, is now available. I've been doing a lot of recipe collection formatting and processing, so both this release and the last one are largely the result of that work. This release has a lot of library browser fixes and usability enhancements.

For a full list of changes, please see the release notes.

As always, MacGourmet 2.1.3 can be downloaded from the MacGourmet download page.

MacGourmet Nutrition Sneak Peek

In this update I'm also featuring a sneak peek of the nutritional database progress. This is only a partial screenshot, and some would call what I have right now vaporware, but I've been making really good progress on things lately. The UI is pretty much complete, and I'm in the process of tying up loose ends. The processes of making the actual nutritional calculations are also largely done, but I still need to do a lot of testing to make sure things are being done right. There are many special cases to handle, and I plan to put things through their paces as fully as I can to find any I've missed.

One thing I can tell you right now: you'll benefit greatly from having clean, consistent data. Things are really easy if the application can figure out your information. The harder that is, the more you'll have to interact with the process. I'm doing my best to make things as intuitive and easy as possible though, so even when you have to do work, it shouldn't be that bad. There's also a way to bend the nutritional analysis to your data as well, if you so choose. You'll find the screen shot sneak peek to the right.

Still coming soon, a sneak peek at the new widescreen mode...