So do you use this in conjunction with the OCR software on your iPhone to make your cookbooks electronic?
Can it work out things like shopping lists, track your store-cupboards, work out what recipes in your list you can cook, etc?
I use ImageToText OCR software; you either take or select a picture and it emails you it in text form. It is amazingly accurate as long as you ensure the book is held flat (curves seem to be where is falls down). I then use the application to quickly select ingredients/method/notes and i am done.
I do not try and import whole cookbooks but just recipes as i want (it is quick enough as to be painless).
In terms of Paprika:
The good:
▪ Automatically download recipes with a single tap from more than 190 supported sites. Supported site list:
http://www.paprikaapp.com/sites/ - these cover a wide variety of food sites and food blogs; i requested a site to be added and it was done within a couple of weeks and works perfectly (i have found their support to be great)
▪ Innovative clipboard tools let you copy and paste recipe information from any website. (iPad and Mac versions - not sure if this is yet on the Android one) - this is a really clever idea; you select the text/image and then click on the relevant button e.g. ingredients/picture/method/notes and it automatically adds that to the relevant section for that recipe - it makes building your recipe collection so quick
▪ Quickly scale recipe ingredients to your desired serving size - this seems to work well and is great to integrate with the auto generated shopping lists
▪ Track nutritional information (automatically saved from sites which provide it) - i don't tend to use this so much but it may be good for some
▪ No-hassle meal planning: add specific recipes or custom entries into the weekly meal planner - this is really clever in terms of sitting down for 10 minutes before going shopping and planning the meals for the week - you just add the meals with one click and it automatically adds all the ingredients into the shopping list (it is easy to go through and remove any ingredients that you already have as you can also see the individual ingredient lists for each recipe in your shopping list). I also find this speeds up shopping on a weekend.
▪ Easily manage your grocery list: add recipes with a single click, as well as your own items. - This is what made me switch from using Evernote for recipes and a separate shopping list app
▪ Customizable categories: assign recipes to multiple categories. - Similar to tags in Evernote
▪ Powerful search tools help you easily find any recipe by source, ingredient or name. - This seems to function well
▪ Full printing and emailing support for recipes, grocery lists, and meal plans. - Great for sending to partners to shop
▪ Share recipes via email (that other Paprika users can automatically import). - Useful if you have friends that use the app
▪ Cloud sync - this for me is a killer feature as recipes and shopping lists are always in synch - especially between myself and the missus for shopping or selecting meal
▪ Offline access. All of your data is stored locally, no internet connection is required.
▪ Bookmarklet. Capture recipes from your web browser straight into your Paprika Cloud Sync account - this is a great feature and i use it often (i think it does require that the site is either on the supported list or is in a roughly standard format)
▪ As you go through a recipe you click on the ingredients and they get "crossed out" - this is a simple idea yet brilliant for ensuring you do not forget and leave something out when cooking
The bad/to be aware of:
▪ Although they provide the cloud synch for free they monetise by selling each version of the application individually (they do put them on sale every now and then though)
▪ It is not currently available on Windows although this or a web based version may be forthcoming (they recently just added Android and are soon to release a Kindle Fire version)
▪ The automatic shopping list in general works great but there is one frustration. If the ingredients are put down as e.g. "2 tomatoes, whole" and "2 tomatoes, chopped" then it will show them separately in the shopping list. This sometimes makes sense and sometimes does not; i have asked support about this and adding a demarcation symbol that would allow proper aggregation when it makes sense e.g. for the tomatoes but not for dried versus fresh ginger - they have replied and are looking at it.
▪ It doesn't track your store-cupboards - TBH i always though this was more trouble than it was worth unless you are really OCD i.e. once you start missing out tracking then it all goes askew
▪ There are no built in recipes - not an issue for me as it only contains what i want it to and it is so easy to add content to
