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Drinks and Cocktail RecipesPosted in Lifestyle on 03 Jan 2009 |
 Reviewed by Steve Litchfield |
  (7 votes, average: 2.14 out of 5)  Loading ... |
Editor’s rating:  
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From the opening screen to the quality of the information within, Drinks and Cocktail Recipes oozes class. Based on almost 6000 different concoctions, every alcoholic mashup from every bar across the world is here. Except that, with this knowledge, you can create everything from “A Goodnght Kiss” to “Zombie #5″ in the comfort of your own living room/bar/office, without paying extortionate prices to pretentious bar staff.
Underlying the Drinks and Cocktail Recipes application is the database, of course. As the name suggests, there’s more here than just cocktails, with the likes of ‘Coffee’, ‘Beer’ and ‘Milkshakes’ all represented too. If it’s a drink and involves mixing ingredients together then it’s here. Period. The instructions for each recipe are brief but well written and (though I’m not an expert) the ingredient quantities look accurate too.
Most impressive of all though is the interface. Drinks and Cocktail Recipes uses the style of the iPhone’s built-in applications to tremendous effect. For example, in any of the exhaustive drink lists, a Contacts-like alphabetic sorter can be used to jump quickly to entries starting with a particular letter. It’s quick and elegant. There’s a Search function too, which works well enough but doesn’t let you search within words, only from the start of words. Once you’ve found a recipe you like, tapping on the star icon adds it as a ‘Favourite’, accessed in future from the first toolbar icon.
The only place where the interface breaks down is in the controversial ‘Ingredients’ section. The idea is to add some of the esoteric ingredients you actually have in the house and the application will search its database and let you know which recipes can be made. The problem is that the ingredients, all 300 of them, are selected using an iPhone ’spinner’, a widget designed to offer far less choices. So getting to ‘Vodka’, for example, (near the end of the alphabet) is an abject lesson in frustration. There’s definitely room for improvement here – the spinner is simply the wrong interface component to use. Once one or more ingredients have been selected, a single tap finds all matches in the database. Rather magically, given that you might have selected a couple of very obscure ingredients.
Having found a recipe by any of the above means, I liked the way the full text could be seamlessly emailed on to a friend. Or even to yourself, for copying and pasting the text from an email client on another computer. Very handy.
If the graphical adverts at the top of every screen bother you, then there’s a commercial ‘pro’ version which does exactly the same job but without the ads for only a couple of dollars. Most people will do just fine with the ad-supported version though. The ingredient spinner and the lack of photos in the application lose it a point for me, but Drinks and Cocktail Recipes still comes highly recommended for a slot on your overflowing iPhone or iPod Touch.
