YummySoup!2.4

Beware of buying YummySoup! unless you only need the functionality it currently has working in the version you buy today. The developer has a history of making grand promises about future feature releases and delivering years down the track, or in a paid upgrade. If you're waiting for the accompanying iPhone app, then believe it when you see it before parting with your money because YummySoup! has always been two-thirds real and one-third vapourware. Don't buy everything you want really exists (and a few other people have written reviews to say they're okay and have all the promised functionality). I've been using YS for two-and-a-half years, since I think version 1.3 or 1.4. There have been constant problems with stability, features in the release version that didn't work properly or at all (export, email), bugs not fixed, and by 1.9 - a version still plagued with stability problems and with many reported bugs unfixed, such as the title selection in the web importer causing selected text to disappear not import, or the tabbing through ingredients in a shopping list causing rows to revert to blank, keyword searches only search on titles... The dev had obviously long moved on to 2.0, to start the whole cycle again with a new group of licensees. Thank Ken, but your idea of a .9 release is not the same as mine - a place to leave a half-finished app while you work on the next paid upgrade. Although the dev was always responsive to emails (I've dealt with worse), actual development moved at a snail's pace - years - and I gave up asking about fixes, even to some of the advertised features that were the reason I bought YS in the first place. I expect that he will take this review rather personally, and so he should - the defensive posture and the replies saying that YS is a one man band really illuminate the problem - the dev's ambitions and publicly-stated promises for the product are wildly out of sync with his capacity to deliver. Screenshots of YS 2.0 look nice, but actual functionality has barely improved - only the weekly planner and export functionality is new; other changes are either cosmetic or promised in future updates. YS 1.x was supposed to have export functionality, but Ken decided to save that for 2.0. The reason this app does well is because its core functionality and idea are good -a streamlined recipe manager and import manager that copes well with importing from most websites. That really is its killer feature. But for groceries, planning, exporting, organising and sharing its features are basic at best, and the app really lacks the polish and professionalism you get from larger developers. If the price matched the reality and the app's ambitions were more modest, this could be a more reasonable purchase. But if you really want to use the YS to its limits, you may be disappointed. I suggest you check out all the recipe managers out there - there's plenty of good ones - and thoroughly test YS in your real-use situation. Don't buy because it looks nice, or because you're looking forward to iPhone integration. MacGourmet has all those features today, maybe give that a look. I still use YS 1.9 because it does everything I need, barely, but it's often exasperating. No more money will be spent on it until the fairy dust turns into something I can touch.

I've continued to use YS but after a move from 10.12 to 10.13.x (High Sierra as a CLEAN setup/install) I can no longer drag a recipe from Safari to YS and have YS then let me do the manual highlight and data entry. Does anyone have this working with High Sierra? I wonder if I need a legacy Java or such. thx

I guess YS is officially gone. As of the past 3 days Ken's www site has been unreachable.
http://hungryseacow.com cannot be found.

His Facebook page has been kinda locked down for a long time. No comments allowed from what I see.

Very sad - although the app continues to have bugs in 2.4 I still believe it to be the most versatile recipe manager for the Mac. After all the "sneak peaks" of the 3.x version and the promise functional iOS integration he has left users hanging.

RIP Yummysoup!

There's a time in life when you know you have to decide to leave someone or something. This application hasn't been upgraded since 09/04/2011. The developer has been talking about v3 for more than a year now and has given sneak peaks at the new interface on his Facebook pages again and again, but we are in April 2014 and nothing is happening. So yesterday I moved on and bought Paprika. After exporting recipes from YummySoup (ysr format) I had no problems importing them in the new software. Paprika is very fast, very easy to interface with the iOS siblings (cloud) and it is updated on a regular basis. I miss the formatting that was available in YummySoup but that's a little issue and maybe will be added one day. Sorry Ken Humbard, you should have worked faster or do what Mikebenda suggested: sell the app.

Current version 2.4 (latests since Sep-2011) has even more issues running on 10.9 Mavericks. Most notable is the scroll bar under the thumbnail images has VANISHED. It is now impossible to scroll thorough recipes. And don't try to use it on a dual screen: if you move it so part is on the 2nd screen that part disappears. For 20 months we have been promised a newer version (on Ken's Facebook) and now the recipe manager app seems dead and no support.

Dear Ken Humbard, so again now here as a review… it's over 5 months now and you always told that an update and new function will come to YummySoup! - but where are they? You write you're working on Version 3 - oh that's sounds great but remember if you plan to take money for this update i'll get very angry and i will take all the power of social networks to tell the world how you do your work my friend. It's not professional to: NOT respond, to PROMISE things that didn't come to answer an two-liner after many weeks AND to tell every customer NOT the truth… SO hurry up and do something for your customers and make us happy… if not i will tell you one thing: I don't give up till the day i get my money back!

this is abandon ware which is a pity indeed

Downloaded the demo, but apparently waited too long before opening it for the first time, so my only choices were register or quit. So I quit, and bought My Recipes instead. With many other apps the trial begins when you first open the program, not when you first download it. You might want to consider doing that. Since I can't submit this comment without completing the star ratings, I'm giving low ratings, not because I think the program sucks, but because the fact that I can't demo it sucks.

Almost 1 year ago I gave YS! a 5 star rating. While I still think this is the best recipe manager out there I've run into several problems the developer has been unable to fix. The current version 2.3.5 has several bugs that I've discussed with HungrySeacow in over 160 emails that I have kept. I love YS' interface with the visual browser to show nice sized photos of numerous recipes in the top and overall I like the web importer. However: I have it crash on a far to frequent basis While using the Web Import it may crash as frequently as 5 times in 10 minutes while I attempt to bring in 10 new recipes. At times I import a new recipe, notice something to change but when I click EDIT it crashes - thus forcing me to live with the errors that are contained in the recipe (or delete it and hope the next import is stable). Some recipes I've had in my library for months will suddenly no longer be editable. I've shared a list of 20 such titles and my library with the developer - he can reproduce but not fix the problem. Even exporting and reimporting these recipes do not fix them. This implies to me there are software coding issues that do not inspect the imported data closely. On occasion the application crashes on launch. Since version 2.2 there have been problems with auto-fill fields not auto-filling. The Web Importer cannot handle multi-word measurements such as "rounded teaspoon", instead placing these in the Ingredient field. The app often crashes when I scroll the visual browser. Searching for a recipe by name does not ignore accented characters: "ragu" will not match "ragú". Minor but something programming would fix. Recently the developer has cut me off his Facebook site: I had previously started a discussion to collect the bug reports from other users and we had 30 or 40 submissions. I could see in their reports that I was not the only one with problems and had hoped this would spur the developer into working harder on fixing the issues. Instead I get blocked and all my discussions and submissions censored and removed. I have over 6250 recipes in YS so I depend on it to be stable. For a while the developer quit responding to my bug reports but last week he sent me the following and I quote directly for his email: "I suggest you delete your library and start with a new one and keep it under 500 recipes." That is not a solution - no where does he advertise this recipe manager as supporting only 500 recipes before it breaks. I would have looked elsewhere if that had been part of the product description. Bottom line - nice looking and functional application that has serious stability and database/library issues.

Beware of buying YummySoup! unless you only need the functionality it currently has working in the version you buy today. The developer has a history of making grand promises about future feature releases and delivering years down the track, or in a paid upgrade. If you're waiting for the accompanying iPhone app, then believe it when you see it before parting with your money because YummySoup! has always been two-thirds real and one-third vapourware. Don't buy everything you want really exists (and a few other people have written reviews to say they're okay and have all the promised functionality). I've been using YS for two-and-a-half years, since I think version 1.3 or 1.4. There have been constant problems with stability, features in the release version that didn't work properly or at all (export, email), bugs not fixed, and by 1.9 - a version still plagued with stability problems and with many reported bugs unfixed, such as the title selection in the web importer causing selected text to disappear not import, or the tabbing through ingredients in a shopping list causing rows to revert to blank, keyword searches only search on titles... The dev had obviously long moved on to 2.0, to start the whole cycle again with a new group of licensees. Thank Ken, but your idea of a .9 release is not the same as mine - a place to leave a half-finished app while you work on the next paid upgrade. Although the dev was always responsive to emails (I've dealt with worse), actual development moved at a snail's pace - years - and I gave up asking about fixes, even to some of the advertised features that were the reason I bought YS in the first place. I expect that he will take this review rather personally, and so he should - the defensive posture and the replies saying that YS is a one man band really illuminate the problem - the dev's ambitions and publicly-stated promises for the product are wildly out of sync with his capacity to deliver. Screenshots of YS 2.0 look nice, but actual functionality has barely improved - only the weekly planner and export functionality is new; other changes are either cosmetic or promised in future updates. YS 1.x was supposed to have export functionality, but Ken decided to save that for 2.0. The reason this app does well is because its core functionality and idea are good -a streamlined recipe manager and import manager that copes well with importing from most websites. That really is its killer feature. But for groceries, planning, exporting, organising and sharing its features are basic at best, and the app really lacks the polish and professionalism you get from larger developers. If the price matched the reality and the app's ambitions were more modest, this could be a more reasonable purchase. But if you really want to use the YS to its limits, you may be disappointed. I suggest you check out all the recipe managers out there - there's plenty of good ones - and thoroughly test YS in your real-use situation. Don't buy because it looks nice, or because you're looking forward to iPhone integration. MacGourmet has all those features today, maybe give that a look. I still use YS 1.9 because it does everything I need, barely, but it's often exasperating. No more money will be spent on it until the fairy dust turns into something I can touch.

Back in the summer of 2009 I downloaded 9 Mac recipe managers and spent 2 weeks making extensive test comparisons. Hands down YummySoup (then version 1.9) was my favorite. First I love the visual browser that shows several recipe images in a large format, not small thumbnails. Secondly the developer has made some of my favorite cooking sites so easy to import that they take 10 seconds to grab. Other cooking sites are imported in a more interactive fashion - something the current version 2.1.3 has made easier than 1.9 While there are some features held back from the version 2 release there is nothing missing for recipe management. I don't use weekly planners nor shopping lists so waiting for these to return is not of concern to me. Lastly I have found the developer extremely responsive and with a good sense of humor. They have replied to dozens of my emails - heck, might even be 100 by now. As a developer myself I understand how in fixing one thing something else can and often will break and they have had a few such setbacks. I truly believe that YummySoup! will continue to mature and be my recommendation to anyone who wants a recipe manager with a beautiful interface and simple operation.

Author listens to his customers and actively seeks the best way to meet customer customer wants and needs. Recipecasts are a great way to share your favorites with the community. Works flawlessly with a MobileMe account. Importing couldn't be simpler. The built-in browser will make you forget you're not using Safari!!! Comes complete with favorites bar to add new sites to.

(1) Nice Web Importer just works Themes keep the interface fresh (2) Needs Improvement Weekly Planner is bare bones Social features are not enabled? (3) iPhone/iPad application - MIA?

Nice work, Ken...but PLEASE...give us the option of having the excessively HUGE folder tree icons or smaller ones. Nearly ever app in the Mac world has that option if it has a folder tree. Thanks!

Congratulations on the new icon! I like the new themes, but all of them suffer from the same problem -- the font used for the list of ingredients is too large and/or the column width is too small, so that many of the ingredients wrap to the next line, lengthening the list of ingredients well beyond the bottom of the page. Some themes with more space for the ingredients would be welcome. (If I knew CSS and all that stuff well enough I could create my own theme, but I don't.) BTW, in case anyone is wondering, it's a $10 upgrade from version 1 to version 2.

Dear Dev: You've punished us long enough. It's time to change that hideous icon. It looks like an insane manatee barfing onto a plate. Please have mercy. Love, Your devoted users.

Dear Dev, PLEASE start work today on a version for the iPad. My kitchen counter is drooling for your software plus Apple's hardware. If anything could make YummySoup MORE perfect, that would be it!

If you click the reply to LARRYMCJ's worried post below, you'll see that he debunks his own theory. So have no fear -- YummySoup! isn't going anywhere and it's undoubtedly the best recipe software available on the Mac. Don't let anything stop you from trying the demo, as it's free and it's awesome. You will want to own a license! If you have questions or comments, the developer is amazingly open and communicative. This is the good stuff, people.

As much as I love YummySoup! I think it's important to post what I just stumbled across in another forum from someone on MDA's "Cookbook" staff who says: "Well, I'll give you guys an update. The developer of YummySoup! will be joining the Cookbook dev team once the contract is hammered out." Unless Ken is going to work for his competition, I'd say YummySoup! might be headed toward extinction...which would be very sad :-( UNLESS...Cookbook will be a superset version of YummySoup! You can read this yourselves at: http://www.macheist.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7476 ...look at post #20 near the end of the thread. LarryMcJ

I love this app. The interface is very much a seamless integration into the rest of MacOS. It looks, feels, and functions like a Mac app. Recipe entry is fast and easy with auto-complete and well thought out shortcut keys. Fullscreen mode is clear, legible, and looks great. And how could you not love that icon? I cracked up the first time I saw it.