MacGourmet

Developer: Advenio, LLC
Category: Lifestyle
Version: 1.0.2
Release Date: Jan 30, 2009
Size: 5.3 MB
Price: $4.99
Rating 4/10

I have a recurring dream involving food. That dream is for my entire weekly grocery shopping list to appear on my iPhone, so I can glide through the grocery store with a tap and a click, then come home and cook up a delicious dinner. Because of this dream, I purchased MacGourmet, a recipe and shopping list for the iPhone, that syncs with the desktop application, which I use and enjoy. The dream lasted about twenty minutes.

MacGourmet is a really smart idea hobbled by indifferent execution. It is a mirror of your desktop database, so in theory, you can whip up a batch of fritters in the kitchen while tapping and swiping through your ingredients. This function performs admirably well, but text-sync isn't what you're paying five dollars for.

The application has four categories you can search through: Recipes, which holds a complete record of your MacGourmet database, Wines, which mirrors the notes on wines you like, Notes, which is a catch-all for additional items, and a Grocery List, which thoughtfully converts the recipes you've chosen into a shopping list. Sounds great, right? Right.

MacGourmet's grocery list is supposed to help you shop more efficiently, but in fact barely keeps you from smashing your iPhone to the ground in frustration. Because each of the recipe ingredients is locked into each recipe, you have to shop for each recipe in order, meaning you either have to madly tap in order to explore the possibilities of what you need from the produce department, or go through the entire supermarket five times. The only way to get around this is to add all recipes to your shopping list at once on your desktop application, then re-synch, which forms a list in unsortable alphabetical order. Ripping up your grocery list and scattering the paper in the parking lot would be easier.

What's more disappointing is that the application is indifferently editable: you're locked into whatever shopping lists you synched to the device from the desktop version. You can make changes to lists, but you cannot add or edit recipes, or even e-mail them to yourself or another person. You have to write it down with pen and paper, which, I point out, defeats the *entire* point of a mobile MacGourmet application.

What first indicated that I was in trouble with this application was the user interface: the start-up screen is supposed to be a cute rendering of a chef's hat, but in fact more closely resembles a skull-and-crossbones. At a time when thoughtful developers are pouring man-hours into every facet of interface design, the feel of this app is old and clunky, almost like a port of one of the bad old "web app" days. This is the poster child of rushing an app to market before it's ready.

It's not difficult to pull off a good grocery list: GroceryIQ and Groceries handle the shopping list task adroitly. And it's not hard to pull off a recipe app, as Epicurious, BigOven and others have done. The promise of MacGourmet is to seamlessly integrate the two, and it's possible that future versions of the application will do that. But for $4.99, it makes the user do too much of the work.

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