Disappointing,

[Edited on 9/17, after adding 159 recipes]
This review is for the Mac desktop version. I bought this on someone’s strong recommendation, and based on the reviews, but there are a few things about this application that drive me nuts, so I [still] can’t be as enthusiastic as everyone else.

I’ll say the positive things first - it’s nice to sync your recipes so that you can go shopping and view your menus on your calendar from your mobile phone. It’s attractive looking. It’s great to have categories with seemingly unlimited sub-categories. It’s nice to be able to do menu planning. Recipe scaling appears to work very well. Importing a recipe from a website is very easy and with the buttons to assist in where to put ingredients and directions when Paprika doesn’t recognize the format is a nice touch. The way you add ingredients to a shopping list from a recipe is nice - with a pop-up checkbox. Also, the automatic formatting for printing recipes looks great, and has just right options for printing.

Unfortunately there are a lot of caveats. I share and receive a lot of recipes, especially family recipes. Using the "More options" item (the one that looks like a Share Icon [youre welcome] - I still could not use the "Facebook" and other social share options - they dont do anything except post the title. The "Email" option just exports it in .paprikarecipe format, which is useless unless the recipient uses Paprika, too. The menus feature is cluinky and confusing. Ive tried using it twice now and its so irritating to figure out each time that I gave up.

Command-N should be a shortcut for a new recipe. This is a standard keyboard shortcut for creating a new item in Apple apps. Why is it not in this one? I keep mistaking the left ‘+’ is to create a new recipe, and Ive lost count of how many times I accidentally created a new category instead. The sync feature across apps is a new thing, but grocery lists and menu planning are not novel features and so these alone don’t make it stand out.

It’s also a major drawback that you can’t add your own ingredients. This severely limits the ability to use the shopping feature.

This is only a small thing, but In the desktop view, there is plenty of whitespace in the recipe summary to include more summary information. Please use this space better. Categories in the summary view - actually in every list/summary view of a recipe - would be very helpful.

I had to get help to figure out how to add stuff to the shopping list, because I expected to be able to do it from the calendar or a menu. If I’m cooking dinner tonight surely I should be able to automatically add everything on the menus for a particular day to the list, right? Instead I have to go to each individual recipe.

I’ve found Paprika only to be adequate. I’ve tried a lot of recipe managers over the years and was really hoping that this one would be great. Its not, and the sad part is that its as good as any out there.

Squeedle about Paprika Recipe Manager