Recipe Software Guide

Today I downloaded and looked into the Home Cookin 5.9, 15 day trial version (by Mountain Software). The following is a brief review of the major comparison points for this recipe software application.

Cost:

• $34.95 for download with 20 recipes, $44.95 for download and a CD with 12,000 recipes.
• Two years of upgrades are included. Outside of the two year period, there’s an upgrade purchase plan of $19.95 for an additional two years of upgrades.

System:

• Home Cookin recipe software works on Windows(98, ME, NT, XP, 2000, Vista, or 7). There is no Mac version. The website says that this product has already been tested for Windows 7 too.
• I tested using XP Professional, Vista Professional, and Windows 2000.
  Approx 1.2MB download that downloaded and installed easily.
• I installed on the XP PC and backups are by copying the entire install directory to a USB card. I did this and removed the app from my PC, then copied the folder back to Program Files. This worked fine. I also copied the USB to my other two test systems, which seemed to work fine.

Support:

There is no phone or chat-line support. Email is the only support option. I received an almost immediate reply to a couple of questions that I had, however, it seems like the software developer is the only person on support, so response could likely be delayed at times (eg. holidays). It also leaves a larger concern that if this person leaves this business, there will likely be no support or upgrades.

Usability:

• General ease of use I stumbled on at first. Right off the bat, it is not Windows GUI standard. There is no min/max in the upper right and if you look at the bottom of the window (shown above) there are totals under the two columns, but you can’t see them because the window doesn’t fit above the toolbar. I also couldn’t figure out how to select all the recipes for my cookbook (I tried the standard Windows <shift key> and left click, but that only selected one recipe).
• It took me a minute to realize that the left side of the Index screen has two different types of objects in it. The green circles are searches and the ones below them are categories (or chapters as they are called in this recipe application).
• There are 3 searches included (All recipes, recipes in meals, recipes with photos) and then Search Results using a free form text search (Find button).
• It was easy to add a recipe (also easy to add a photo to it) and to search existing recipes.
• The application has a help tool, 30 or so basic functions explained. I did use it successfully when I had some meal planner confusion.
• If you have set up your email client properly, you can create an email from a recipe.
• It is also easy enough to copy the current recipe to the clipboard and then in a new email, you can paste the clipboard into the email text field.
• The recipe can be printed by itself or in a group of recipes (in many page and card size formats).

Recipes:

• There are only 20 recipes provided (this is intended for speed of download) for the base download and 12,000 additional recipes available on a CD (for an additional $10.00 which includes shipping). This is intended so if you are mainly adding your own recipes you can go straight for the base download and get started.
• The quality seems average and they use readily available ingredients. About a quarter of the 20 recipes have photos (so its hard to tell how many of the 12,000 will) and there are no how to videos for these.
• Adding your own recipe is easy enough, there are 2 main free form text sections to enter ingredients and instructions. Photos can be uploaded to the recipe and there is also a spell check.
• There are no specific ratings or favorites fields for a recipe. I got around this somewhat, by creating a chapter (in the index tab) and called it Favorites and then you can copy recipes into that chapter. You could also type ratings or favorite words or clues into the free form contents of the recipe and search for them later.
• There is a resize button (to change a recipe from say 4 servings to 8 servings) and then it lets you resave the recipe that way if you like.
• There is also a locate duplicate button which allows you to find duplicate recipes and delete the duplicates based on criteria that you provide. You have to be careful however, if you copied recipes into a Favorites chapter (like I mentioned a couple of points earlier), because these will show up as duplicates and you don’t want to delete these.

Other features

How to videos: none that I could see

Nutritional breakdown:

None that I could see (they say this is intended because its difficult to know what brands of products the chef will use, however, I believe that its possible to come up with reasonable values on supplied recipes and think that they just didn’t get around to it)

Meal Planners:

This application uses a calendar based meal planner.

When you are in the recipe tab, just click the new meal button to add this recipe to today’s meal. There are no specific lunch, dinner options (that I could see), but you can order the meals to imply lunch, dinner, etc. Its also a little quirky to add a recipe to tomorrow’s meal. I needed to go to the help to figure out that every recipe goes onto today’s planner and that you can drag and drop the recipe into the day on the calendar that you want (nice, once I figured it out, but there doesn’t seem to be drag and drop functionality anywhere else, so it wasn’t obvious).

Shopping lists:

• It took a bit to figure this out. Each ingredient (and you can add more of your own) can have store and location (department) info added. First of all, there are no lists of stores or locations to choose from, so you have to hand enter it each time you want to use it. By tying the store to the ingredient, it will point you to the same store every time you need that ingredient and there is no way of changing this aside from changing it to another store on the ingredient. A shopping list is basically a list of things to get matched with places to get them. The pairings of these may be different each time you shop and should be more flexible than this recipe software product provides.
• To add an item from the recipe to the shopping list, you click the item (say Onions) and a list of all Onion ingredients appears. You increment a counter on the onion ingredient that you want.

Imports:

I was able to import a recipe that I exported text to a file. I did not test each import option. The online help states:

The Automatic import method supports recipes exported from MasterCook, Meal-Master, Big-Oven, Cookbook Wizard, From Scratch, From My Kitchen, Living Cookbook, Now You’re Cooking, Recipe Processor, or Computer Chef.

 
Exports:

You can export recipes in the following formats: Home Cookin, Meal-Master, MasterCook, Html, and text to the clipboard.
The directory and file management is a little DOS like and quirky. When I click export to file, the directory structure I get defaults to A: and I can type a filename in and it allows it and saves the file to C: .

Producing a Cookbook:

There’s a nice easy to use feature that creates a cookbook (in PDF format) of selected recipes.

Conclusions:

Pros:

• Fairly simple application that only took me minutes to download, install and start using.
• Easy to add a new recipe from a variety of inputs.
• Printing features seem easy enough.
• Easy to create PDF cookbook.
• Simple backup procedures.
• Very good application for basic recipe with photo handling.

 
Cons:

• Only email support is available.
• Some little things that should behave better, like it should be more Windows like, directory functions, drag and drop functionality.
• No How to videos.
• No nutritional information.
• Meal planners and shopping list a little clunky.

Uncertainties:

• Upgrades seem to be good, but longevity of package might be an issue if this is just a one developer application

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