MacGourmet News

Yes, that time has FINALLY arrived! I'm looking for some brave souls to beta test the first version of MacGourmet for the iPhone/iPod touch: MacGourmet Touch.

What I need from people interested: Just your name and the id of your iPhone or iPod touch. The requirements are that you have a WiFi network, or WiFi-capable Mac, and are running Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

To get your phone id, sync your iPhone to your Mac, which will start up iTunes if it's not already running. Then, select your iPhone in iTunes and choose the Summary tab. Click directly on the "Serial number" label. This will toggle the display to show you the 40 character phone identifier. Without selecting anything, choose Edit > Copy and then paste the contents of the clip board into an email message (or just click this link to open a new email message), and send that off to macgourmet [at] advenio.com with a subject of "MacGourmet iPhone Beta". The beta test should get underway soon. Thanks!

Labels: Beta, Sneak Preview

It's been a while since the App Store opened, so I thought I'd share a sneak peek at how MacGourmet:To Go is coming along. I've been working on this on and off for a while now, and I'll admit that development has been slower than I'd hoped.

One challenge is that I'm trying to make this as full-featured as possible, without getting too complex, because any iPhone app should be simple, and, if there is a desktop counterpart like MacGourmet, should be a subset of that.

What that means for MacGourmet:To Go is that I'm not doing JUST a recipe application, I'm essentially doing recipe, wine note, cooking note AND shopping list applications. That's quite a lot, and I'm sure there are/will be other applications that do each thing individually, so I think you can kind of get an idea of the amount of work involved.

I haven't even mentioned the fact that I have to develop my own way to get your data on the iPhone/iPod touch, because Apple currently doesn't provide this for us.

At any rate, there you go! Work is progressing, and I'm trying to get it done as soon as it is possible. Enjoy!

Labels: Sneak Preview

So, now that version 2.2 and Nutrition have been released, you may be wondering, "what's next?"

Well aside from any bug fixes on the new releases, making some cosmetic tweaks for Leopard, and adding a way to enter your own nutritional items to Nutrition, the next big thing on the ol' "To Do" list is menu planning. The heavy design "lifting" has already been done, as have some of the UI elements I'll be using, so it's actually already underway. My hope is that this feature will be simple, and easy to use in a variety of manners. Being redone alongside menu planning will be shopping lists. I've already done the design for this as well, and plan on rolling in a lot of the things people have been asking for. Still, if you have anything specific you'd like to see in either menu planning or shopping lists, feel free to post them in the comments.

You will probably also see some other things in the interim, like new importers and exporters, and maybe some new plug-ins. I'm actually thinking of opening the MacGourmet "Test Kitchen," a place where you can download and try things before they are ready for release, but I haven't finalized the specifics of that yet, it's just an idea I've been kicking around.

So far 90% of the sales of MacGourmet have been to English-speaking countries, so another thing I'm planning to do is, again, try and get localizations done. I had made a push in the past, but that kind of fell flat. Because MacGourmet changes often, and there is so much language, it's been hard to get to a point where localizations can be done. Hopefully version 2.2 will be a good jumping off point. I already have some localizations that had been submitted by people in the past, and I plan to see where I'm at with those. Once that's determined, I'll probably be looking for people to help localize and test localizations, not all at once, but one at a time. Here's the thing though: I'm not sure how I can support non-english speakers. Localizations, while great, I think set the expectations that support will be available in the different languages. We'll have to see how this shakes out. I'd be interested in thoughts from people who are in support of localization in their language. I also don't know how to publicize MacGourmet once it's available in the different languages, so any help with French/German/etc. Mac sites would be welcome.

Labels: Sneak Preview

MacGourmet 2.1.4, another maintenance release, is now available. While it includes some new ways to guard your data, the biggest change is a fix for a trickey-for-me-to-find bug where categories selected while editing multiple recipes, and while importing clippings were not always getting applied to the recipe or recipe selections.

For a full list of changes, please see the release notes.

As always, MacGourmet 2.1.4 can be downloaded from the MacGourmet download page.

For those people who picked up an iPhone this weekend, this version of MacGourmet, while only a minor fix update, DOES include some support for viewing recipes, notes and, yes, shopping lists published to your .Mac account on the iPhone. I've made a new iPhone-specific theme for publishing, Camden iPhone and it's available on the Publishing page. To install it, just download the theme file, and double-click it [NOTE: Due to a small bug in 2.1.4, the new type for the theme wasn't added correctly. Instead of double-clicking the theme file, copy it to the Library > Application Support > MacGourmet > Templates > Publishing folder in your Home folder to install it instead]. Then, make a new web site, select "Camden iPhone" as your theme and publish to your .Mac account. If you want to check out sample recipes on your iPhone first, just point your iPhone browser to iPhone Sample Recipes for some samples.

Finally, another teaser of a new feature, the widescreen mode. This will be an optional display mode, in addition to the current, standard mode available now. This new feature also includes a new, condensed summary list view that includes photo thumbnails of your recipes for quick browsing. This new mode will be part of version 2.2, which I'm currently in the process of wrapping up development on now.

Labels: Sneak Preview