Review: iCookbook turns your Windows 8 laptop or tablet into a gorgeous cookbook - councilsamesessuld59

At a Glance

Expert's Valuation

Pros

Phrase
Beautiful recipe photos
Sensible categories

Cons

No way to filter by formula metadata (planning time, etc.)
No simple way to change the number of servings per recipe

Our Verdict

iCookbook is a recipe search and exhibit app for Windows 8 with lots of scrumptious photos. It's beautiful and well-well-conducted, but you may need to physique a few more minutes into your cooking time to convert quantities so forth.

There are few things more appetizing than gorgeous, altitudinous-resolution photos of toothsome food. Cookery book editors have known this for years, and the modern cookbook is bursting with full-page glossy photos showcasing the recipes. iCookbook is a $5 cooking app for Windows 8 that takes this aesthetic and brings it to life with thousands of photos, for each one leading to a attractively typeset formula.

Windows 8's Current UI is all about tiles, and iCookbook uses them to good vantage. Every recipe is portrayed by a tile bearing a photo and legend, but they're not all the same size: The main screen is subdivided into several categories, each with a large centerpiece tile and triplet smaller tiles downstairs. These categories let you browse recipes by dish, ingredient, theme, cuisine, juncture, and brand.

iCookbook's main screen surfaces recipes using beautiful, bold imagery.

If one of the images on the briny screen catches your lacelike, just click to open the ladened recipe. But if you'd like to recitation deeper into a category, you can click its header and retrieve yourself in a submenu with vertical tiles, one per subcategory. So click Dish, and you get Appetizers & Snacks, Beverages, Breakfasts & Brunches, and many more. Penetrate a subcategory, and you'll find yourself in a blind full of alphabetically sorted tiles, each for a formula therein subcategory. There are often more recipes in a subcategory than can fit on the screen, so you lavatory scroll to see more – horizontally. In point of fact, all scrolling in iCookbook is horizontal. This bum be strange and distracting at first, but such is the direction of the Innovative UI.

iCookbook lets you easily and visually browse recipes by several disparate categories.

With thousands of recipes available, search is a must-have feature. At the start I retributive tried typing, expecting a search bar to pop with my first keystroke, like it does in the Windows Start CRT screen and Windows Computer storage. When that didn't happen, I brought up the Windows 8 Charms block u and clicked the Search icon. That did the trick, and I was able to quickly search for recipes.

When you draw up an individual recipe in iCookbook, you get a larger variation of its pic first. It starts off blurry, becoming sharp after a few seconds. Next to the photograph, you'll recover important information about the formula, such American Samoa its level of difficulty, how galore people it serves, how many calories are in a serving, how eternal it takes to cook, and its average rating (you can as wel set your own rating for the recipe). Some of these values are underlined, which way you can penetrate them for further information. For instance, you can mouse click a recipe's calorie info to get a full dislocation of organic process values. This is cracking information, just unfortunately, you can only use some of it for filtering: On that point's no way to search for all biscuit recipes that are marked as "Easy," for instance. There's also no way to aline quantities (turn a 9-person recipe into a 2-person one).

The formula view uses large typography, so you don't have to set your laptop or tablet besides neighbouring to your work area.

Right past the formula info you'll find a list of ingredients and notes, often with branded ingredients (2 envelopes FLEISCHMANN'S RapidRise Yeastand so forth). Some of the more complex recipes, such as Apple Cinnamon Rolls, have complex ingredients with recipes of their own, such as Malus pumila Filling or Cinnamon-Sugar Topping. These say "(formula follows)", but there's nowhere to click, and no way to actually get at that ingredient's recipe. Even manually searching for "Apple Filling" didn't bring up that recipe, instead conciliatory a long leaning of apple cakes. The trafficker is working along a solution for this.

Each formula has interesting metadata, only it can't be used for filtering.

Fortuitously, not all recipes are this complex, and many are self-contained, so you sporting need a single recipe to make the dish. In one case you find much a recipe, you can scroll (horizontally) through each ill-use as you bring on direct the formula. Stairs are displayed with large, audacious typography, each ending with a small "What's next" note so you know what's approaching. The epic typography way you can drop off your Windows 8 laptop computer surgery tablet somewhere in the kitchen and glance at it every right away and then while cooking without having to put IT in harm's way.

You john quickly research through recipes using the Search feature article build into Windows 8.

ICookbook was fast and responsive in my examination, with hunting results, categories, and individual recipes all coming up instantly. Animations were legato, except for the place screen, which had a nervy, stuttering transition every clock time I brought IT up. If you're looking for around culinary inspiration and be intimate photos of food, this is a great app to examine.

Note: The Download button on the Product Entropy page takes you to the Windows Store, where you crapper download the in vogue version of the software.