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Review: iCookbook turns your Windows 8 laptop or tablet into a gorgeous cookbook |
December 21, 2012
There are few things more appetizing than gorgeous, high-resolution photos of delicious food. Cookbook 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, each leading to a beautifully typeset recipe.
Windows 8's Modern UI is all about tiles, and iCookbook uses them to good advantage. Every recipe is represented by a tile bearing a photo and caption, but they're not all the same size: The main screen is subdivided into several categories, each with a large centerpiece tile and three smaller tiles below. These categories let you browse recipes by dish, ingredient, theme, cuisine, occasion, and brand.
iCookbook’s main screen surfaces recipes using beautiful, bold imagery.
If one of the images on the main screen catches your fancy, just click to open the full recipe. But if you'd like to drill deeper into a category, you can click its header and find yourself in a submenu with vertical tiles, one per subcategory. So click Dish, and you get Appetizers & Snacks, Beverages, Breakfasts & Brunches, and many more. Click a subcategory, and you'll find yourself in a screen full of alphabetically sorted tiles, each for a recipe in that subcategory. There are often more recipes in a subcategory than can fit on the screen, so you can scroll to see more – horizontally. In fact, all scrolling in iCookbook is horizontal. This can be strange and distracting at first, but such is the way of the Modern UI.
iCookbook lets you easily and visually browse recipes by several different categories.
With thousands of recipes available, search is a must-have feature. At first I just tried typing, expecting a search bar to pop up with my first keystroke, like it does in the Windows Start Screen and Windows Store. When that didn't happen, I brought up the Windows 8 Charms bar and clicked the Search icon. That did the trick, and I was able to quickly search for recipes.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2022597/review-icookbook-turns-your-windows-8-laptop-or-tablet-into-a-gorgeous-cookbook.html
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