PCHARLES67 This is a pretty credible piece of brewing software, although it really could use a little work on the usability front. Its real strengths over other Brewing Apps, for the Mac, is its ability to import recipes into a database, suggest recipes from ingredients if you have a recipe, export to a web page, and send to your iPod if you want to brew with your iPod. The main problem I have with this software is how you enter the recipes: 1. Choose New Recipe from the menu and you would expect it to open a recipe blank to work on, but unfortunately you have to rifle through your recipes to find the new recipe and then double click to open. 2. Entering ingredients requires selecting from a menu, which I found to be incomplete in both the grains and the hops, and it was not immediately obvious how to change those. 3. Once a recipe is entered, if you want to make minor tweaks to the volumes or ingredients you can work with sliders for the ingredients, which is nice, but it is much more tricky to work with the volumes. There are several other problems, but this are all generally minor and you can learn to adapt to them, or you can take a look at Beertools Pro. Although I have a registered copy of BeerAlchemy and use it for importing and viewing a list of recipes, I fear that the new unreleased version of Beertools Pro will trump all of BeerAlchemy's current advantages. It already trumps Beer Alchemy in terms of Usability and available recipes. (Version 1.5.2) |