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PDACookbook Plus
November 12, 2002
PDACookbook Plus is really two products in one, a handheld application and a desktop application and conduit. Installation is straightforward, and after the simple process you can enter recipes on either the handheld or the computer and everything will be transferred over when you HotSync. In both places the applications are virtually identical, which makes the learning curve very short. Entering a recipe is as easy as pressing the “New” button at the bottom of the screen, giving the recipe a title, and then adding ingredients and the actual directions for making the dish. This can be a little painful at first, since there are no ingredients in the database when you first start using the program. But after you enter in a few recipes, it gets really fast— just a matter of entering the first few letters. PDACookbook will fill it in and you can then just hit the “Add” button to add that ingredient to the list and go on. Once all the ingredients are in, you can put in the directions, and then you’re done. You can also add a category, nutritional information, the number of people the recipe will serve, etc. It’s all up to you. When you are done, tap “Save” and the recipe is added to your database.
PDACookbook is more than just a recipe database, however. You can also create menus by adding recipes to certain dates, which is very helpful if you’re the organized homemaker type that likes to plan everything ahead of time. The program can also help you with your shopping list, and here’s where a bit of care in creating the ingredient database will go a long way. If you make sure to enter each item only one time, then every recipe that uses that ingredient will be uniform. When you add three recipes that use the same ingredient to your shopping list for the week, the program will automatically calculate exactly how much you need to buy of that ingredient, be it ground beef or cheddar cheese. And when you look at the ingreient database, you may have wondered what that “aisle” field was for, but now you know. If you want to minimize the amount of time you spend in the store, you can’t do much better than making sure that at the very least you only go down each aisle once. That way you don’t have to go all the way back to the bread aisle after you’ve picked up all the dairy goods.
You’ll also find all of the nice little touches that you’d expect, such as the ability to beam recipes and shopping lists to other Palm OS devices (which is very handy if you need your husband to go to the store at the last minute) and to export menus, shopping lists, and recipes to the Memo Pad. That’s a great bonus if you want to share a recipe with someone else but they don’t happen to be using PDACookbook Plus. You can also import recipes from MealMaster and MasterCook, which is great if you already have a large selection of recipes in one of those programs. There’s nothing worse than having to re-enter tons of information just to get started.
I used the desktop side of the application much more extensively than the one on the handheld, mainly because I’m subscribed to a daily recipe email list. If I like the recipe, I add it to PDACookbook immediately by cut and paste. In the supermarket I use the shopping list feature, and in the kitchen I’m more likely to use a printed out copy of the recipe. That may have something to do with the fact that I just paid $500 for my Tungsten T a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think that even a Ziploc bag would provide enough protection for my new device. Of course that may have more to do with the various spills (and fires) that break out in the kitchen whenever I try to cook.
I’ve found only a few minor flaws with PDACookbook Plus. The main one for me of course, is that it is not compatible with Palm OS5. That means that it won’t work on the new Tungsten T from Palm, or the Sony NX series. The other is that it also is not fully compatible with Flash RAM, which is important for people who are running out of space on their handheld device. It seems that PDACookbook will run just fine if it is stored in Flash, but after you use the program it will crash on exit, every single time— at least on my Sony NR70. Some of the icons and tab labels on the handheld version can be a bit confusing too, at least if you haven’t used the desktop version or at least glanced at the manual, but that’s a fairly minor issue.
If you’d like to try it out, you can pick it up at the WakefieldSoft web site for $17.99. There’s no guarantee though that PDACookbook Plus will make you a better cook!
PocketGoddess rating for PDACookbook Plus: 
