ncage1974
Senior Cook
I'm in a little bit of a conundrum here. For the longest time i have stored my recipes in MasterCook 9. I remember when i first installed Windows 7 (maybe vista) having issues. Then windows 7 came out with some type of compatability update which fixed the problem. Well its not working again. Apparently some recent update to Windows 7 has broke it.
So here i am thinking what i should do. Mastercook 11 is finally available that is supposed to fix a variety of the problems but reading amazon reviews a lot of people are less than impressed and i don't know to be stuck like this again when Windows 8,9,ect... comes out. When a company that owns the software is named "valuesoft" i don't have to much trust in it. It took them forever to go from 9-->11 to make it work correctly with vista/7.
I looked at a variety of the other popular recipe database programs like big oven, accuchef, livingcookbook. I will be honest with you. Whoever is developing these programs SERIOUSLY needs a UI (user interface) designer because all these programs look like there were designed in Visual Basic 3 back in the 80s. Also, i don't want to be in the same situation i am now....i update my software on my PC and it will no longer work because the recipe software i'm using is no longer being updated and they are using some proprietary file format and essentially all my recipes are locked up.
Here are my choice i think:
1. I'm a software developer. I'm been toying with developing my own Recipe Database. To be honest this isn't a trivial task (if you want it to be descent). Its going to take me a lot of time & energy to develop my app...but its definitely something i could do. The big advantage would be i would be using a industry standard database that if something happened i could easily pull the data out of.
2. Recipe Website: Good examples would be allrecipes/food.com(recipezaar) and other such websites. The big disadvantage of using a website would be i know longer own my data. Something happens to the website or something like that all my recipes would be lost. I just don't like the thought of not owning my own data. Maybe if that had a good export feature that would export all you recipes to say MS word then i would feel safer.
3. Use MS Word, OneNote, Excel...or something similar.
Something like word would definitely have its advantages. One of the big advantages would be formatting. The recipe would look nice with all the original formatting from wherever you found it. Also entering recipes is a snap because you can just copy/paste in a lot of cases.
The disadvantage would be in organization and searching. You could definitely search your recipes but its not going to nearly as precise as a recipe program. You don't have nearly as much flexability with stuff like tagging, favorites, categories, ratings, ect... Also you can have some organization by just putting recipes in folders & subfolders but a recipe database would be better on that end.
What do you guys/gals think?
So here i am thinking what i should do. Mastercook 11 is finally available that is supposed to fix a variety of the problems but reading amazon reviews a lot of people are less than impressed and i don't know to be stuck like this again when Windows 8,9,ect... comes out. When a company that owns the software is named "valuesoft" i don't have to much trust in it. It took them forever to go from 9-->11 to make it work correctly with vista/7.
I looked at a variety of the other popular recipe database programs like big oven, accuchef, livingcookbook. I will be honest with you. Whoever is developing these programs SERIOUSLY needs a UI (user interface) designer because all these programs look like there were designed in Visual Basic 3 back in the 80s. Also, i don't want to be in the same situation i am now....i update my software on my PC and it will no longer work because the recipe software i'm using is no longer being updated and they are using some proprietary file format and essentially all my recipes are locked up.
Here are my choice i think:
1. I'm a software developer. I'm been toying with developing my own Recipe Database. To be honest this isn't a trivial task (if you want it to be descent). Its going to take me a lot of time & energy to develop my app...but its definitely something i could do. The big advantage would be i would be using a industry standard database that if something happened i could easily pull the data out of.
2. Recipe Website: Good examples would be allrecipes/food.com(recipezaar) and other such websites. The big disadvantage of using a website would be i know longer own my data. Something happens to the website or something like that all my recipes would be lost. I just don't like the thought of not owning my own data. Maybe if that had a good export feature that would export all you recipes to say MS word then i would feel safer.
3. Use MS Word, OneNote, Excel...or something similar.
Something like word would definitely have its advantages. One of the big advantages would be formatting. The recipe would look nice with all the original formatting from wherever you found it. Also entering recipes is a snap because you can just copy/paste in a lot of cases.
The disadvantage would be in organization and searching. You could definitely search your recipes but its not going to nearly as precise as a recipe program. You don't have nearly as much flexability with stuff like tagging, favorites, categories, ratings, ect... Also you can have some organization by just putting recipes in folders & subfolders but a recipe database would be better on that end.
What do you guys/gals think?
) but I also had my recipes folder saved onto a backup drive so I didn't lose any of them - unlike some other data and photos!!! 
