10.17.06
One Windows Beats Mac
I know, blasphemy
Maybe I’m just ultra picky, but it seems to me that Windows has the Mac beat hands down when it comes to recipe management software. I can’t find a Mac app that does what I want. I don’t think I want much just the following:
- Calculate nutritional information. Partial credit for at least tracking it for me, I can figure it out once… but you have to let me say “I made 1.25 of this thing, because that’s how much chicken I had, figure out the calories.” I could come up with some hacks, but everything I looked at only scaled by fixed amounts, like 1/2, 1 1/2, 2 times, etc.
- Help me plan my meals for the week.
- Make me shopping list.
See, it took me all of 30 seconds of googling to find a Windows program that did all this. And then some. It’s really kinda cool looking, and is making me consider firing up Parallels to give it a whirl.
On the Mac side, I’ve tried everything verstiontracker knows about. Twice. Six months apart. They all suck. The ones that track nutritional information of some kind either get it very very wrong (calories, carbs, fat… WTF? Where’s protein?) or they don’t bother and get it all nice and shiny. Why the fuck do I need Spotlight support for my recipes. I’m not going to search my computer for ‘cookies’ and go “oh yeah, those cookies, I should have some.” If I’m searching for food to make, I’m going to have a pretty specific context to it.
Sure, spotlight support is easy, but a the expense of other features? It seems to me that the Mac applications are only about six months behind. Maybe a year. For one guy full-time. What boggles my mind is that they’ve not caught up in the time since I last went looking for a meal planning kind of program, they’re basically frozen in time.
Maybe my dream app will help out with this one. I certainly won’t be able to make the time to write it my own damn self… which is really what I need to do, but Excel is “good enough” for the time being.
The ironic part is that this is a program that everyone has written at least once. It’s like “Computers 101″ for nerds. You’d think someone would have come along and done something different by now. Different like how Delicious Library was different, even though everyone had written (or thought about writing) a database app to track their books.
Aoife said,
10.17.06 at 1:44 am
Ah… I remember trying to do book record keeping, though I didn’t write an app for it, I did *pick* the app I used for it. Does that count?
I need to stay geeky enough to remain married to you, and you’re pulling away fast.