MacGourmet News

One of the ways I work on new ideas is to build prototypes that incorporate new ideas. Sometimes these prototypes actually turn into something. The Amazon.com Shopping Plug-in, which I'm posting to the Test Kitchen today, is an example of one that did.

Now before you say "Why is he working on this when MacGourmet still doesn't include [insert your most wanted feature here]?" projects like this plug-in help me to try new ideas, and keep things fresh, without disrupting normal MacGourmet development.

Some of the ideas in this plug-in you will probably see show up in MacGourmet at some point. Some of the ideas are just ones I wanted to play around with, like using the Amazon.com web service, and being able to search for cooking related things without all of the "noise" of the regular Amazon.com web site. One thing that's really nice about this plug-in is that you can easily see the Amazon.com stocked products that match your search (think "free shipping") one thing that I've always found sort of hard to do using the regular web site. If you want to shop Amazon.com this holiday season using this plug-in as a jumping off point, you'll be buying though the MacGourmet affiliate link, but making affiliate commissions is not why this was done.

I'm releasing this as something MacGourmet users can try out and play with, sort of a preview of upcoming things. If people like it, I'll continue to improve it from time to time, as new ideas are added to it, because it is, foremost, a testbed for new ideas, and a development project. Let me know what you think!

Labels: Test Kitchen

Nutrition 1.1 beta 3 is now available from the Test Kitchen. It allows you to add your own nutritional items to the database, and it includes fixes for some calculation errors and a few other bugs. It also features an update to the latest data available from the USDA, SR20.

Updated documentation is still pending.

Labels: Test Kitchen

Nutrition 1.1 beta 1 is now available from the Test Kitchen. It allows you to add your own nutritional items to the database, and it includes fixes for some calculation errors and a few other bugs. It also features an update to the latest data available from the USDA, SR20.

I've been doing a lot of testing so things should be pretty stable and correct at this point. Still, if you encounter any problems, please use Send Feedback in the MacGourmet Help menu to send a report. Include the recipe as well, as an attachment. Note you could see some nutritional value changes if you recalculate, both because of updated information from the USDA, and the fixes added (if you happened to have data that hit the problems). Updated documentation is still pending.

Labels: Test Kitchen

I've opened a new area on MacGourmet.com, the MacGourmet Test Kitchen. The Test Kitchen is a place where you can find and try out new pre-release versions of MacGourmet, new plug-ins and other cool things.

First up is MacGourmet version 2.2.3a. This update addresses the disabled popup menu items in the import assistant when you are running Leopard.

I'll be posting things periodically to the test kitchen, and will post about them here, so check back often. Please remember though that anything on the test kitchen page you use at your own risk, so always backup your MacGourmetDatabase file before trying anything new.

Also note that the link for the Test Kitchen is at the bottom of the main MacGourmet download page right now.

[Update: MacGourmet 2.2.3a has been replaced by the 2.2.4 release version, and so is no longer available.]

Labels: Test Kitchen