Mela - Recipe Manager 17+

All you need to know is that this app removes all the personal backstory blather from recipe sites (“Want to make a corn muffin? First, here’s 4,000 words about my experience on 9/11…”) and leaves you with a clean copy of what you were looking for in the first place. From there, you have all manner of customization and sync options if you want, but the basic task of scraping and delivering a usable recipe from your basic, awful, SEO-tilted-template recipe site is incredibly accurate, quick, and consistent. I do not miss the newsletter interstitial popups. I celebrate their absence. It’s been a long time since an app was so good I actually looked forward to rooting through all my old notes and bookmarks to populate it. Mela is that app, and it’s actually been fun to see all the insanely different stuff I saved over the years come together in a single, sensible presentation. Nice touches abound (keep-awake on iPad is great). There is of course room for refinement (“select all” and “select none” buttons when adding groceries would be nice), and the app doesn’t save your place when you switch to another app, but these are nice-to-haves. The dev is great, so I expect these kinds of rough edges will get dealt with. On that note, if you’re into RSS news feeds, check out Reeder by the same dev, also best in category, imo.

I finally found the app I was looking for. Mela allowed me to combine recipes that used to be spread across four different apps. I can now access all those recipes in one place with a consistent, clean and modern interface. I used to store recipes in Trello, Instapaper, and the NYT cooking and How to Cook Everything apps. Mela made it incredibly easy to import all those recipes, and I was completely done in only a couple hours. Importing web-based recipes via the built in browser was seamless (including NYT cooking). And even for my non-web based How to Cook Everything recipes, I was impressed by the efficient parsing that easily recognized pasted lists of ingredients and steps, and automatically formatted those sections. The RSS-based feed is just icing on the cake, and I look forward to discovering new recipes from a variety of sources within the app. I expected a lot from the developer of Reeder (which I have used every day for countless years) and I was not disappointed. Highly recommended to anyone looking to consolidate and access their recipes in a single and modern app.