I’m also pleased that Mela is available on all of Apple’s platforms. Calendar-based meal planning, which I understand is on the feature roadmap, would be a nice addition too. I’d like to see a curated list of recipe feeds, as I’ve already mentioned. There’s a lot of functionality built into the app, and its design is far more refined than the typical 1.0 app. This isn’t a simple single-purpose utility. Mela is easily one of the best new apps I’ve tried this year. The bright, yellow accent color and the clear, carefully laid out text are just part of the app’s appeal.įinally, the Scale button reveals a slider for up or downsizing a recipe, changing the quantity of ingredients automatically. It’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into using Mela in the kitchen. What makes Mela truly special is its exceptional design. That’s a lot of ways to get recipes into Mela, but with the exception of RSS, other apps offer similar features. In the meantime, here are a few of my favorites: There are still plenty of excellent feeds available, but it took some work to find them, so I’d love to see Mela add a starter set or recommendations in the app itself.

The one trouble with feeds, which isn’t a limitation of the app itself, is I’ve noticed that a lot of recipe sites don’t have RSS feeds. It’s a brilliant addition to a recipe app that makes discovery much easier once you’ve added a handful of sites with recipes you like. The recipes in Feeds can be searched using the search field at the top of the recipe list and refreshed by pulling down on the list. The recipes delivered to your feed are available locally, so you can prepare them from right inside the Feeds section of the app if you’d like, or save them to your recipe collection using the ‘Add this Recipe’ button. Then, when you open the feed section again, you’ll see recipes from that, and any other feeds you’ve added either together chronologically or by website. Mela will look for any RSS feeds and offer to add them to your collection. Tap the More button at the top of the sidebar, and add a URL. Feeds have a dedicated section in the app’s left sidebar. It may not be surprising that Mela uses RSS since Rizzi’s other app is an RSS client, but what I didn’t expect is what a fantastic way it is to discover new recipes. The only shortcoming of the 'Feed Me Now,' though, is that it's weirdly un-filterable-you just get what's around, not what's around and cheap (for example), so it's still a little bit of a hunt.Some of the recipe RSS feeds I’ve been following.įinally, Mela offers a way to collect recipes that I haven’t seen anywhere else: RSS. The 'Live Feed' looks like it aggregates tweets and updates from chefs and restaurants in the city, so you can see specials and events without having to make your own twitter a food-only stream. Our favorites, though, are 'Feed Me Now' and the 'Live Feed.' 'Feed Me Now' uses the GPS on your phone to pull up the list of chef-recommended food in your area, which will cut short a lot of miserable conversations with your indecisive friends. Or, you can pick 'Their Favorite Dishes,' which just pulls up a big 'ol list of food that you can filter by price, place, type of food, etc. We see you doing a 'thinker' with that knife, Ripert). You can look at the 'City's Best Chefs' (the app is only for NYC, Chicago, LA, and SF right now, but will be coming to six more cities soon), which is basically a who's who of who's cooking in the city, and see their personal picks for the whole conurb (and some nice glamour shots. The app's home screen has a few options for finding food. Chefs like good food because they eat all the time. To like this app, you have to trust that chefs have any idea what they're talking about (and buy into the celebrity chef industrial complex a little bit), but that's not a huge leap of faith.

Iphone app chef