Musings from The Software Underground

Well a milestone was finally hit. It was time to push a new application into the sunlight, for all the world to see, whether it was ready or not. Today marks the release of the first beta of MacGourmet. Please try it out, and send us any problems or suggestions. As this is the first wide release of the application, there are bound to be issues, but early testing has hopefully shaken out a lot of the problems.

After the beta period, MacGourmet will be available for $24.95 from our online store.

The coolest features of the new application have got to be the web clipping service and the .Mac integration.

The web clipping service came about because I wanted an easy way to get recipes that I found on the web into the application, recipes that often didn't have good enough delimination in their html code to allow for parsing. The service allows you to grab the text of any recipe, and store it in your clippings list for later. Then when you are ready, you can simply double-click on your clippings and step through the text of the recipes, putting the parts of the recipe into their proper locations so that they import correctly. In testing, I've imported many, many recipes this way, and I think you'll find it pretty easy to use.

Integration with .Mac, you can see an example here, allows you to easily publish a collection of your recipes, wine notes and cooking notes to your .Mac account. This allows you to share great recipes you've found, or created, with others. In addition, you can also publish collections to WebDAV servers and to folders on your Mac. While the text and images of your items get published to the web, you can also include MacGourmet import files as well, allowing others to import recipes that you've published simply by dragging the "file" image off of the page and into one of your MacGourmet lists.

A note to users of SQLGrinder, I'll be spending a lot more time working to get to feature complete version 2.0, now that MacGourmet is to a public beta, so hopefully, at long last, the next version of SQLGrinder will also get out the door sooner rather than later.