Measuring Cup: A Free OS X Recipe Manager

Posted by Doc Logic on 01/7/08 in Featured, Home & Personal

Recently my wife (the proud owner of a new MacBook she procured over Christmas) tasked me with the job of finding her a recipe manager for OS X. Her only pre-requisites were that it had to be cheap, easy to use, and not something that would slow her down. After a couple cups of coffee, and some plowing around on Google I managed to find something that fits right in with her ‘give it to me free’ ethos - Measuring Cup by Shallot Patch.

Measuring Cup is not fancy although there are a few commercial offerings that are. Instead it is a very lightweight and simple little app written in Cocoa that features a tree view organization of recipes with user defined categories and subcategories. The system is fully searchable and provides all of the features you would expect for a database app of its ilk. You can enter in the name of an item with units of measure, serving size, prep time, steps to prepare, calories and nutritional facts. There is a small square for a photo of your dish to finish off each entry.

Measuring Cup in Action

One thing I noticed is that if you’re sharing recipes the import/export feature might be really handy if you know some other Measuring Cup users. Hit me up if you’re a user as I would love to test that out!

Their really are not any bells and whistles with Measuring Cup but I also don’t think their really needs to be. Measuring Cup runs on Tiger 10.4+ and is completely free, but I noticed the author receives donations from happy users looking for enhancements. So that’s about it for this simple program - If you’re handy in the kitchen you might want to check Measuring Cup out.

del.icio.us tag this | digg this | permalink | ping

6 Comment(s)

Legend:

Guest

Article Author

Contributor

Bruce A said on

January 7th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

Looks interesting, even if it uses the now-deprecated Aqua drawers. I’ve tried all the shareware recipe organisers, and none of them works quite right. I look forward to giving this one a shot.

JamesC said on

January 7th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

I like the idea of this, but why does it ask for my admin password when i start it? Is there a way to check what it is doing and why? details just says Right: system.privilege.admin but not why measuring cup needs it.

Serge said on

January 7th, 2008 at 4:53 pm

Hey cool just installed this on my gf’s MacBook. Pretty basic but gets the job done, like you said.

@JamesC: I didn’t get the admin pw request here. Leopard 10.5.1.

(subscribed to comments) Add karma

Yonghwee said on

January 7th, 2008 at 8:26 pm

Great! Nothing beats free.

JamesC said on

January 8th, 2008 at 7:16 am

Re: Admin pw request

I emailed the developer and he told me following:

- If you are not running as administrator, it will ask for the password. The reason is that it needs to install a schema file at /Library/Application Support/Shallot Patch/Measuring Cup/foodRecipe_1_0.xsd. It is installed at the /Library level so that other users can share it as well.

So double thumbs up to the dev for both an excellent app and fantastic support. Cheers!

Becky said on

May 25th, 2008 at 7:03 am

I’m a user and would love to share (as I’ve been trying to use that feature too). Word of warning though, all my recipes are vegan.