Mela - Recipe Manager 17+

Love it, it’s my default recipe book now, I use it for everything I cook. I’m even keeping coffee techniques and cocktail recipes in here, all easy to filter with the tags. As you’d expect from the developer the parser is excellent. My collection is growing from websites as you’d expect but scanning cookbooks is fast and surprisingly accurate. Sharing was a huge addition. It’s now the family recipe book, no more asking someone to message over a link to check Ingredients when shopping a few taps and everything goes straight to the shopping list we were already using in Reminders. I wasn’t sure I needed an app for this, a collection of links and photos in Notes had been working fine but I’ve been proven completely wrong. I’m using the app every day at this point just because even if I don’t plan on cooking something a second time adding things is so easy and using the app is just a better experience than any recipe blog/site I’ve come across. It’s not flashy but disabling auto-lock has been an absolute killer feature, it’s just so handy. Very well done!

I recently downloaded this app to use. Currently it seems the best free one out their. But there are missing functions or else I would have given it 5 stars. 1. The first annoyance is the view = I cannot see a whole recipe page on my screen because of the annoying sidebars of sub-categories down the left hand side of the page when I open my recipe page. The app should should give an option turn them off or make the recipe page open to full screen size when selected. 2. The second annoyance is the scanning function = when I add a recipe photo from my pictures or take a picture of a paper recipe you cannot scan an image of the food at the same time you scan the text, it won't select an image, only text, the scanner function also assumes that all recipes to scan are only 1 page = wrong, I have some 2 page recipes to scan but there is no function to tell it the text to scan is on more than 1 page. 3. Another pain in the neck is there is no simple title of recipe index list so I can't see what foods I have listed in which category I have created in the categories or a simple title list in the "all recipients page". I have also had to invent a complex numbering system because I cannot move or arrange my categories in the order I want them to show because they seem defaulted to list alphabetically (I don't really want Deserts listed before Starters!)

Fantastic app that does everything so well! I’ve been using it for the last three months and have enjoyed the experience, from adding recipes to buying groceries and cooking food. The UX is great as it adheres to iOS standards while adding a touch of style in the branding. The fact that it directly plugs into the iOS reminders and Calendar apps is a massive game changer, as it allows me to plan the recipes with shared reminders and calendars.

I can’t wait to see my catalog of recipes utilizing all of the features, including tags, favorites, etc., in a year’s time! Definitely my favorite app of the year. It’s fair to say I’m an advocate among my friends and family, haha!

Minor issue I have – and this by no means takes away from how good this app is – is that when importing recipes from Waitrose food recipes, instructions seem to be broken up onto individual lines. I have manually edited the instructions to fix this; however, if this is something that could be fixed in development, it would be extremely appreciated!

Thank you!