London Stabbie has been quite annoyed today. He has resurrected his old computer in order to ensure that everything useful is removed, and exported his recipe book this morning. Now there is nothing more useful in keeping and disseminating and sharing recipes than a computer. One would think that after many years of storing recipes on computers someone would have figured out a good way of exporting recipes and then importing them into another computer or another program. One would be wrong. Very wrong. As wrong as drinking shiraz with lemon sole.
Stabbie was amazed at the speed of the export from a very old version of Mastercook into a text file. Less than 5 seconds for 2MB of recipes (Stabbie has lots of recipes).
Stabbie then copied the file into his new computer and fired up Mastercook 11, guaranteed to work with Windows 7. Then he imported the recipe file, and while there were a few mistakes (reported by the software) most of the recipes seemed to be imported fairly well.
So Stabbie took at look at his mother’s recipe for spaghetti and meatballs. He was surprised to learn that it required no meat, no tomatoes, but a lot of flour and sugar and baking powder. Somehow Mastercook had slipped a gear and missed out several recipes, putting the wrong labels on the subsequent ones.
So Stabbie deleted all the recipes, and opened the text file with the exported recipes in it. He now has to import them 10 or 20 at a time and go through each. Some have ingredients misplaced, and others don’t have the instructions or notes correct. Stabbie has more than 1500 recipes in his database. He’s not looking forward to the next four months.
Cooking software is written by dweebs for noobs.
This is also true for geneological software.
Stabbie would like to get the programmers, and especially the people who arranged the user interfaces and the import and export engines, into a very small dining room, lock them in, and feed them chocolate cake iced with Ex-Lax. The toilets will not be accessible.