You mean procrastinate? 
And, silly me. Should have realised there would be a difference in price. 
Trouble is I find too many ways to procrastinate from doing important procrastination jobs like that … how to procrastinate the procrastinator. 
And the really silly thing is most of the bits are made in this country! 
I had a look at buying a 750GB Iomega drive at the beginning of the year … if I remember rightly, Iomega was selling them in the US for about $400 … I would have had to order from Shanghai and it would have cost about $1000 plus delivery (Shanghai’s about 400 miles from here). Fortunately I was saved from idiocy by the fact that they didn’t have any in stock and recommended a USB drive when I wanted a FireWire drive. But a 320GB FireWire 400/USB 2 drive in an aluminium rather Iomega-style case is now around 80 quid, bought locally.
Mark
Here in the UK, we also get stiffed on prices compared to America. I think they believe we’re made of money. Okay, so we all live in castles and have butlers to do our bidding. 
It still doesn’t excuse the huge price increases. 
fantasist!
I’m merely trying to continue in the vein of thought the Americans have of us Vic. Who are you to try and spoil that illusion for them?
Actually, from reading these forums I’m beginning to think of you more as sitting around in dingy pubs getting drunk while complaining about American prices… 
Ah… Okay, you got me there. 
Damnation and hellfire, knew I was gonna get busted sooner or later.
Another bottle of the Ol’ Dog over here please landlord. And let’s get this Wi-Fi cranked up a bit. You need to update. Can’t afford a new one you say? Pardon? In America they’re how much?
I’ve been using a freeware recipe program, Yum, while deciding which software to buy. I picked YummySoup because it did much of what I need to do and the developer says he’s working on the rest of what I really need. That’d be: an importer to bring in recipe collections from other formats, i.e. MasterCook, MealMaster or any of the other very popular formats. And of course, a way to re-size recipes! C’mon, what am I to do with a favorite recipe that only serves 3 when I’m having 8 dinner guests for my world famous General Tso’s Chicken? I have to bring it into Yum which has a re-sizer. The developer is promising that for the next update, we’ll see.
It has a very nice GUI and a great way to import single recipes from certain sites like foodnetwork.com Just drag the url into the program and everything is automatically imported, even a photo, if available. It’s a terrific way to add to my recipe collection.
It was on sale for Mother’s day and I couldn’t resist it for $15. And I’ve been called a “mother” often enough that I didn’t feel un-entitled. 
Now that I’ve had some more time with MacGourmet and YummySoup I can say a few more things:
- MacGourmet is an “old Mac App” and has some weird UI things that aren’t seen in more modern apps.
- MacGourmet has some weird issues, like when I combine two shopping lists it loses data, eg- the store and aisle information gets erased.
- MacGourmet and YummySoup’s developers seem well intentioned but there’s a lot of “incorporating feedback” that results in adding XYZ features; in my opinion this is a dangerous thing that threatens to make the app too complicated and less fun to use. I’m more of a 37signals http://37signals.com kind of person. I find KB to be hesitant to dump more features into Scrivener
too.
Right now I’m sticking to MacGourmet until I find a suitable replacement. I still need to try out Sous Chef http://www.acaciatreesoftware.com/ which I discovered via DaringFireball.
I’ve been using YummySoup for quite awhile but the lack of developer’s attention to the software drove me to MacGourmet Deluxe and I’ve been using it now for a couple of months.
Someone (not me) wrote the following recently in the YS forum.
“Is YS still beging actively supported? I’m not trying to sound like a jerk here, but there have been several posts recently regarding problems importing recipes from web sites and other glitches in YS, with no response from Hungry Seacow. The last response to any bug report was in early November. Additionally, the developer has on several occasions promised updates and new versions, but nothing has materialized. I can’t help but wonder if YS development has stalled, but I’m hoping that there’s some good news coming instead.”
The developer’s response the next day was, “Good news” followed by a smiley face.
A few days later a small update became available that didn’t include promised features such as the capability to re-size recipes. He’s been promising that feature since the middle of summer.
Now today the site’s forum is either having difficulties or has been disabled. Perhaps he’s growing weary of people asking why the web importer features don’t work because they haven’t been updated to work with changes on various recipe websites.
The way he’s been acting, it’s just possible he’s Amy Winehouse’s new BF.
I would not recommend YummySoup to anyone (although I love its interface–it is best of breed). MacGourmet works pretty well for me. It is often updated and the recipe importers automatically import from supported sites with no trouble.
I went for MacGourmet Deluxe, because it seemed the only one with a nutritional database and capable of checking the nutritional value of a recipe. I also liked the bit where I can fairly easily copy a recipe from a site.
I also like the pantry search option (I have x but not y)
I’ve used it for a few months now and it does what I want.
Tanja
MacGourmet does what I want, too.
At least, mostly. The nutritional plug-in doesn’t do basic unit conversions for you, so unless your desired unit is listed in the database for a particular ingredient (supported units vary by ingredient), you sometimes have to go back and edit the recipe (my workround: do a manual conversion into American then put my original unit and quantity in the description field of the ingredients list). And the menu facility doesn’t tie in with the nutritional database to give you the nutritional breakdown of a complete meal or day’s worth of food (which is the only use I would have for it). And when you make a web clipping with the intention of processing it later, there is no way of storing the source of the clipping and the date.
Other than those niggles, I find it very usable.
This might sound a bit nuts, but does anyone know of recipe or related software which helps you calculate your per-meal costs?
So for example you enter in how much your 1 pound bag of rice cost, and how much you paid for 2 pounds of chicken, and a jar of korma sauce. And then you can enter in how much of the rice, sauce, and chicken you use in a recipe, and the program would calculate a per-portion cost for the meal.
I don’t know if this exists but I would be interested if it did. Any leads?