MacGourmet News

Nutrition 1.0.1, a small maintenance release, is now available.

This update fixes a problem seen when ingredients have a single quote in the description. It also adds the number of servings used in the nutritional analysis to the nutrition facts box when displaying a recipe.

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

MacGourmet:Nutrition 1.0.1 can be downloaded from the main Nutrition page.

Ten recipe managers entered the arena, and MacGourmet came out the victor.

Andy Affleck, a self described "long-time home cook and collector of cookbooks" writing "with that background and from the perspective of a cooking hobbyist" chose MacGorumet as his everyday recipe app in a recent TidBITS article.

MacGourmet is my top pick, and it's the program I found myself using on a daily basis. I recommend it for anyone, especially people who want to import recipes from Web sites.

He had lots of nice things to say, starting with:

MacGourmet has a beautiful, intuitive interface that made learning my way around easy and fast.

and moving onto the web import:

Of all the programs tested, MacGourmet fared the best at importing recipes from the Web. Every recipe I tried from a wide variety of Web sites and email messages imported nearly flawlessly.

He did have some issues with the just released Nutrition 1.0, but like MacGourmet itself, I plan to streamline and optimize Nutrition based on what you, the users, want, so you can bet you'll see improvements over time.

And don't expect any "laurels sitting" in the future. There are still some great things coming, like meal planning, a new and improved shopping list, and more so stay tuned.

Read more: Cook from Your Mac: 10 Recipe Tools Compared.

If you use Digg, let others know how MacGourmet fared by digging this: Cook from Your Mac: 10 Recipe Tools Compared.

What is MacGourmet:Nutrition? MacGourmet:Nutrition is an optional plug-in for MacGourmet that allows you to easily calculate nutrition information for your recipes. It is available at an additional cost to the base price of MacGourmet.

So what does Nutrition cost? The regular price is $11.95 and you can purchase a serial number from the online store. For a limited time though, you can get Nutrition for only $9.95, by using the coupon code NUTRITIONPROMO when you order AND I'll throw in the "Bonus Pack" with 142 recipes, 5 publishing themes and one display theme, a $10 value! (Just press the download button on your order confirmation page.)

MacGourmet:Nutrition Quick Overview

MacGourmet:Nutrition is made up mainly of two components: the editor piece and the nutrition database. When installed, the nutritional information is accessed from the Nutrition tab of the recipe editor. To open the nutrition database, choose the Nutrition command from the Tools menu in the menubar.

The nutrition database allows you to browse all of the information in the USDA (release 19) database. It is also the source of the mappings necessary to do nutritional calculations.

Mappings are creating by dragging and dropping nutritional items from the nutrition database window to the ingredient mappings list in the recipe editor. If you look at a recipe, you can see that the product comes with some basic default mappings already defined. To do correct calculations though, you need to make sure all of your ingredients are mapped to nutritional items in the nutrition database.

Doing this is a pretty simple process: search the nutrition database for an item that best matches your unmapped ingredient and drag and drop it from the list in the nutrition database to the mappings table in the editor. For example, if you have an ingredient in the mappings table that is listed as "pure maple syrup" you can find a nutritional item by searching the nutrition database for "syrup" or "maple" to find "Syrups, maple." You can then just drag that row from the nutrition database to the mappings table to complete the mapping. When the nutrition is calculated, this nutritional item will be used for the "pure maple syrup" ingredient and for any other ingredient in your database that has that description.

Once all of the mappings have been made, you just need to press the "Calculate" button to do the calculations. Sometimes, the measurements/weights you have listed will not match what is in the nutrition database exactly. When this happens, a weight resolver will pop up and allow you to chose a correct match. An example I like to use the case where you have an ingredient that is "3 eggs." You'll need to choose the size of each egg being used, so that the correct values can be used in the calculations (for example, 1 extra large).

So those are the basics of using the plug-in. It sounds more complex than it really is. I do suggest reading the updated documentation, which has more information and tips for improving the quality of your calculations.

[I know from feedback during the beta that there needs to be a way to add your own items to the nutrition database, so expect this to be added in the first non-bug fix update, probably version 1.1. I've actually already started work on this addition, but it's something that will need a good deal of testing before release, so it didn't make it into version 1.0.]

You can try out Nutrition by just downloading it and double-clicking on the installer package. An unregistered copy allows you to calculate the nutritional information for 20 recipes. If you like it, you can purchase a registration for $11.95 $9.95 (with the a free copy of the Bonus Pack, for a limited time)!

Try MacGourmet:Nutrition today!


So "why the extra cost?" you might be asking. It's a business reality that to survive you must have multiple revenue streams, and in a lot of cases that means upgrade fees. Even Apple charges what is essentially a yearly fee for both iWork and iLife. The "all or nothing" upgrade model isn't one that I wanted to follow though, and this is why Nutrition will be available as a separate, totally optional, add-on product. Doing this allows me to keep the base product simple and cheap. Believe it or not, a lot of people just want a simple recipe organizer, and offering Nutrition separate from the base product allows me to maintain that simplicity. It also allows me to stay out of the "charge for every major update" model that a lot of companies use. So far, MacGourmet has been out for over 3 years, and in that time it has had one major, 3 minor and 21 bug-fix updates, and they have all been free.

I'd really like to continue that, and offering Nutrition as an optional feature, at an additional cost, will hopefully allow me to do that. Rather than releasing say, MacGourmet 3 with nutrition as a major new feature, and then requiring everyone to pay an upgrade fee to gain the overall benefits even if they don't want nutritional analysis, version 2.2, with the new display options, is a free update, and Nutrition is an add-on.

Releasing Nutrition as a separate product also means that it will have it's own update cycle. You won't have to wait for new versions of MacGourmet for updates and new features. When they are ready, you can just download a new version of the plug-in.

MacGourmet 2.2, a free, minor update with some great new features, is now available.

This release adds a widescreen preference that uses 3 columns to display your information. It also adds table summary views that display information in a new, compact way, and an easy way to search for duplicate recipes. Because of some changes in the display themes, if you are using any of the "add-on" themes you'll want to download new versions from the themes page. MacGourmet 2.2 is also required for the new Nutrition plug-in.

One other thing to note is that because the registration engine was updated, you may get asked to "Activate" your copy of MacGourmet. This is normal, and should be the only happen once for you on each Mac you use for MacGourmet.

Also part of the new version is a new method for installing plug-ins. All you need to do to install a plug-in now is: get a plug-in package, and double-click on the package file. MacGourmet will do the rest. Two new plug-ins available now are the Food & Wine site importer, which allows you to import recipes from Food & Wine recipe pages, and the iPhone Web App Exporter, which allows you to build web-based iPhone "applications" made from your recipes. You can find the iPhone App exporter on the Importing and Exporting page, and the Food & Wine Importer on the Web Site Import page.

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

As always, MacGourmet 2.2 can be downloaded from the MacGourmet download page.