YummySoup! for Mac2.4

Does anyone know how I can get to my recipes? YS is not opening for me. Sharon

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!

This app was abandoned by the developer years ago. Ignore it and buy Paprika instead, which costs a little more but is 10 times better, has great iPhone and iPad apps and is regularly maintained.

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 developer, Please sell your software to someone who will update and maintain it. Sincerely, The user community

I really like this application but am disappointed that neither the promised new version nor an update to turn off idisk sharing are available after all this time.

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!

YS is a good app that suffers from a slow pace of development. The dev has been promising new features for a long time, but it's been a year since the last update. There's still no proper capability in YS to sync between Macs. I made the mistake of buying the iOS version a year ago on the promise of new features coming soon, and the ability to sync between my Mac, iPad and iPhone, but just like the Mac version, there's been no updates to the iOS app since then. I've finally given up and am making the switch to Paprika, which offers full sync capabilities and frequent updates that add features and fix bugs.

I like this app and use it often, and I've read below where the developer states he is working on a new version, however it would be nice if this version was updated to not check for my (discontinued) iDisk.

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.

2.4 has been more stable than 2.3.x and after many weeks of troubleshooting repeated crashing when editing/saving recipes I have a breakthrough. From my 35 years of programming I was say there is a recursion bug in YS. I can open a new database with only default recipes and in 2 changes in the preferences / Smart Measurements get the app to crash repeatedly. Finding this out lead to a solution to many of the crashes I've had. 2.4 still has problems with modified images not displaying, searches not yielding correct matches, images added to the Notes section coming out huge and the developer's temper.

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.

The latest version (2.3.x) makes this software a favorite for recipe management. The previous version was lacking a every important feature: grocery list. This is now included and I do not need to look elsewhere for a recipe software. The Web importing function is very well implemented and saves a lot of copy/paste operations. Adding more pictures to each recipe (also in v2.3.x) will prove very useful for recipes with a set of pictures describing that recipe. The interface is very powerful and I love being able to add and organize folders as I choose. In the past I had several crashes but stability has improved a lot in the last few versions. Overall, a great product.

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.

Easy to use, great import from the featured websites, easy import from other websites. Simple uncluttered interface and usage. Hangs up sometimes but the program is under active development so I expect it will only get better. Best of all, my wife uses it easily without the need for an IT consult!

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.

Yummy Soup is by far the best recipe software you can buy. Importing is so easy. The smart groups are great. The developer provides regular upgrades it to make it even better & provides outstanding customer service. It is far less expensive than other recipe software yet does so much. The view options are wonderful as are the printing options. The ability to use recipecasts as well as add notes are also great. I cant say enough good things about this software & its developer, Ken. I have used several other recipe programs over the years but none as as user friendly & full featured as Yummy Soup. Try it - you can't go wrong Louise M.

If you are into cooking, Yummy Soup is a must have. It will keep your recipes fabulously organized. Best money I have ever spent. Tech support is awesome as well.

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.

I love YummySoup and have been using it for years, but now I want more…I want to send my shopping lists to a YummySoup app on my iPhone and have the ability to check off the items as I purchase them. And yes I will pay for the app through the app store. Please, please, please….

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!

I really like this app, but would be a lot more inclined to use it if this icon didn't ugly up my dock. How about another icon? Really, almost anything would be better.

this is a great piece of software. It makes it so much easier to keep track of all my recipes.

In an earlier comment, I noted that the shared library feature was buggy, and could overwrite a newer shared version of the YS library with an older local version. I have since figured out how to reliably share my YS library between three Macs, and even though it's a workaround, I feel that I can now give YS the five stars it deserves. I can now retract my earlier recommendation to avoid YS if you want to share recipes between Macs, provided that you set it up the way I have. The shared library resides in a file called YummySoup! Shared Library.YSSL. I moved this file to my Dropbox, which syncs it between my Macs. That's the easy part. The challenge is to get YS to open the shared library each time, and not the local library. How I do that is by launching the YummySoup! Shared Library.YSSL file, instead of launching YS itself. I even went so far as to copy the icon from YS to the shared library file, and create an alias to it called YummySoup. The way it looks like the YS app, so that even if my brain stops working for a moment, there is almost no chance I could ever launch YS directly, which avoids the problem of YS overwriting the shared library with the local library. I've had it set up like this for a few months, with no problems. As an aside, the nice thing about using Dropbox for syncing is that it keeps older versions of files for 30 days, so if anything ever goes wrong, I can retrieve the correct version of the shared library.

Yummy Soup is truly a great MacOS program and probably the best Mac recipe manager out there. The program is so intuitive that my not so computer savvy wife picked up using and importing recipes in a matter of minutes and now uses YS about 80% of time (vs. cookbooks and binders) for all of cooking. Furthermore, the developer is constantly improving and updating the SW with tweaks and fixes. A great find and an awesome bargain.

YummySoup is hands down the best recipe app out there. This is a programmer that truly cares about his program, I've had to e-mail him twice with questions and he replies within just a few hours - unheard of with other pieces of software. IMO YummySoup is the easiest to use and i have tried them all. I think what stands out is how simple it appears to be, but it's actually packed full of features. Of these features I like the Any Site importer the best - it has a few sites that you can automatically import from and that works flawlessly, but for those recipe websites that are not yet supported automatically, the Any Site importer makes it so easy to just snip my recipe right into my collection. I love YummySoup!!!

I have been using YummySoup for about 4 months and I love it. It's so easy to use, and when you have two working parents and 3 children having my recipes all in one place is so convenient for me. The importer is so easy to use, on Sunday nights before the week starts I'll go online and import some recipes, and then browse through them with the family and we pick what we're making for dinner during the week. The visual browser makes that a lot easier, then my husband and kids can actually see the food and then make some choices. One of the best features of this program is the full screen. I inherited a ton of recipe cards in a box from my mother, but I can't make those go full-screeen and talk to me while I am cooking!! Try it out, this is program is so handy and so so so easy to use.

The "shared library" feature remains quite buggy in version 1.7. I originally tried using a local network volume to store the shared library, but wanted to have access to it when travelling. So I switched to using my iDisk, but connectivity and latency issues with iDisk proved to be too much for YummySoup! I then switched to using Dropbox, which has worked flawlessly. Or at least the Dropbox part has. YS fails to open the shared library half the time, opening the local library instead, which is always out of date and missing a bunch of recent changes. That wouldn't be so bad if YS didn't automatically save over the shared library when it quits. When that happens, I'm forced to spend 5 or 10 minutes restoring the current version of the shared library and launching and re-launching YS until it manages to open the shared library correctly. Fortunately I have a solid backup system for my data, so I haven't lost anything yet. The "shared library" feature comes with a warning within YS, so it would appear to still be a work in progress. The developer used to maintain forums where I could have tried to get this "shared library" issue addressed, but the forums disappeared a couple of weeks ago. I sent the developer an email over a week ago, but there's been no response. Bottom line: If you want to share your library of recipes between two or more Macs, hold off on YS until this feature works reliably, or look at another recipe app that can do it.

I've used this software for a number of years and it is great for importing a recipe from a web page. When I need a recipe I email it and view it on my laptop in the kitchen, or iphone when I travel. I also view it via my iphone to buy ingredients. Prior to buying this years ago the Mac did not have many recipe programs that work as well as this one does.

I must be on a different planet. I find this program extremely unstable. I have the latest version and I paid for it. I worry for my data when basic functions are unstable.

I've been using this for several months now and have been impressed with almost every aspect of it. The interface is excellent and the any site importer is particularly nice. I find myself saving more recipes and cooking more often because this software is such a pleasure to use. Beautiful, well designed, well worth the money. The only thing on my wish list so far would be the ability to customize the fields available during the import. A minor deficiency, though, compared to what it does well.

Very good recipes.

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

This is the best recipe database app I have found. Its best feature in my opinion is the ability to import recipes from a web page. The drag and drop simplicity of its import system is incredibly easy to use and intuitive. I regularly import recipes from the The New York Times and other web pages without worring about mistyping or getting amounts or instructions wrong. And the full screen cooking view is a godsend. It disables your screen saver and creates a full screen recipe view that makes it easy to read and follow the recipe while cooking. I take my MacBook into the kitchen all the time to use this feature when preparing meals. I love this app. Well done.

I have tried all the versions (did I say ALL) of recipe software currently available for my Mac Book Pro. Well they are all nice looking and so on, Yummy Soup came along when I pretty much had given up on finding a recipe organizer/manager for capturing recipes online. I was very pleased with it's simplicity, clean look and ease of use. But like all the other programs, it was tied to a few online recipe websites and the rest were manual entry. Then a new day dawned and they released there newest version which has an outstanding and brilliant workaround for those recipe websites that are not part of their standard program. It is now far and above any of the other programs. For $40 it would be steal but a $20 its a donation to great work! Well Done! Warning: It has a wonderful little video tutorial but little else in the way of how to use it. So you will have to play around with it a bit, but once you get it (and it won't take long), you will be all set.

It will be hard to keep up with the Cooking App that is in the making at MyDreamApp.com but nevertheless, this piece of software hits more than a couple of nails on the head. Clean simple interface, especially the Coverflowlike browsability through the pictures. The 'online' part is very interesting, especially since you can post your own creations to be included in there as well. Congrats to the developer!

I have tried lots of COOK BOOK software. This one is so easy and straight forward. It sticks to the " keep it simple but very useful", concept. The drag and drop feature for recipes is great. It isn't a cheesy data file system. It has powerful features yet one doesn't need to be a tech geek to use it. It is obvious this developer listens to his customers. It is so great it should be included with the Mac core system.

Some nice features found in this one. Very easy to make shopping lists and lots of recipes to choose from. Truthfully I wasn't going to write a review, but someone mentioned it being the same thing as Yum. I tried Yum and they're not even close. There's a reason why it's free. I felt justified spending the $20 on this app.

This is a nice app, but Yum is free and does pretty much the same things. http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10225/yum

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.