YummySoup vs Connoisseur
Posted by Emily McCutcheon on 02/9/08 in Featured, Home & Personal
Awhile back, I reviewed Connoisseur as a more fully-featured alternative to Measuring Cup for organizing and using recipes on your Mac. While the program had every feature I was looking for, its developers, The Little App Factory, apparently no longer offer support or answer e-mails.
Based on a recommendation in the comments I’ve tried out YummySoup as an alternative. YummySoup, shares many of the same features as Connoisseur. It comes with a fair library of recipes sorted into categories and rated by taste and difficulty, and gives you access to a small database of recipes from various websites.
Like Connoisseur it has a grocery list feature, though instead of automatically listing every ingredient from any recipe you want to use, it allows you to choose only the ingredients you need and enter them manually. I was actually a little off-put by that, but probably only because I’m impatient and we’re usually low on everything in our cupboards whenever I want to bake.
The rating system for difficulty and taste is simple and very easy to navigate. Green is easy, yellow is moderately difficult, and red means you might want to try it a few times before offering it to a guest. You can change the difficulty rating of a recipe simply by clicking inside the bar — left is easy, right is hard. The change is instant. You can also sort recipes according to difficulty or by rating out of five stars.
If that’s not enough for you, the Wine & Spirits option allows you to create a database of drinks to serve with any meal, sorted by Region, type, style, where you can buy it and how much it costs. You can also add a picture so you can recognize the bottle; it’s a simple matter of drag and drop or copy and paste. Recipes can be imported or exported pretty easily. This program can open Connoisseur or MacGourmet files, which is convenient if you’re switching over. On the other hand, importing recipes from the web is not quite as fast or simple as it is in Connoisseur, though The AnySite Web Importer is very straightforward; paste the URL of a recipe into the bottom of the screen and hit enter.
The page loads inside the Web Importer. By highlighting sections of the recipe on-screen and then hitting any of the options at the top you create a recipe file. Highlight the title, hit “title”, and poof! your recipe has a title. The same goes for description, origin, prep and cooking time, inactive prep time, yield, ingredients, and directions. Once you’ve done that, each item remains highlighted in a particular colour so you know what you’ve already included. And of course you can drag a picture of the finished product into the top right. Click on the screenshot below for a close-up.
hile the AnySite Web Importer is very simple and direct, it’s not as fast or as easy as Connoisseur’s web import, mainly because you have to tell it which part of the recipe is what. After trying Measuring Cup, Connoisseur, and Yummy Soup, I’d say Connoisseur has the best features and the most intuitive interface, but you run the risk of having a problem and not getting any support from the developers.
Measuring Cup is free but doesn’t have half the features of either of it’s competitors. YummySoup is a solid competitor for Connoisseur in that its features and interface are fairly competitive, running close to Connoisseur but not quite meeting it. On the other hand, the site is active, updates are available automatically, and support seems to be excellent based on reviews.
YummySoup 1.6.3 is available from Hungry Seacow Software. The trial run is free and fully-featured for 15 days before requiring a $20 license.
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