Mela – Recipe Manager +17

Mela has been the best recipe manager I've used of a few. The interface is clean, without a bunch of multi-step fatigue when choosing recipes. The real shine for Mela is the cooking view. On Mac and iPad you have a persistent pane with your ingredients, and a clear view of directions. You can also add multiple timers on the same screen! Other recipe managers I've used aren't any better than viewing a site, so I appreciate Mela being innovative.

If I could change anything about Mela, it would be to allow support for Safari extensions. I don't know whether this is possible, but cooking websites have an aggravating amount of ads and other intrusive data tracking practices. Mela doesn't collect any information, and it would be wonderful if the browser followed the same privacy rules. If I want to support a cooking site I buy their cookbook, online ads are a cancer.

This app is so good that I paid for both the Mac and iOS versions because I wanted to be able to access it on all devices. The design of this app is fantastic and feels thoroughly thought out. I'm especially impressed by the recipe import and how accurate it is. I tried the import feature on my phone on a site that had 2 separate recipes to be made together; I expected to have to fix a few things but it detected both recipes and created separate sections of ingredients/steps for each one in the app. iCloud integration works perfectly for sharing recipes with others and I really like the ability to send ingredients to a grocery list in the reminders app (which can also be shared with others).

Two features I would love to see in the future:
1) reading out ingredients/instructions while in cook mode since sometimes you can't look at the phone while performing certain steps or your hands are dirty.
2) linking other mela recipes in a recipe such as having a homemade mayo recipe and using that in other recipes for salad dressings, aiolis, etc.

I do really like the interface and syncing options. I've been using the other spice keeper app for a few years now. I tried importing 2 recipes from the web and Mela failed pretty hard. This alone has me at least waiting since that is an important function for me. I really liked the import scanning feature, but the couple hand written recipes I tried it on needed some work to fix. I felt like it needs some improvement in both of these areas. I did notice it said scan a recipe from a book, so that may work better, but I didn't try that yet. I also liked the Cook mode, although I use an iPad for that and both viewing modes looked great. I want to like this app, but there's a few improvements needed before I can justify converting. The star rating would also be a great improvement as I have used that in the past.