Martha’s Everyday Food: Fresh & Easy Recipes – Review

Our rating:

By: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2010-02-15

Developer:

Price: 0.99

User Rating:

Loading...

Download App

There is a certain level of quality one would expect from anything that has Martha Stewart’s brand name on it.  The question one would immediate ask is: is a recipe magazine for the iPhone and iPod touch worth the $.99 investment and space on your iPhone?  By my reckoning, the answer is no.  Particularly when you consider that the Epicurious app is offered for free in the App Store and it offers more recipes.

To begin, the application should not require a data or WiFi connection to get content.  I understand that it makes updates to the data, but I personally think that a few thousand recipes are more than enough, and the speed increase to have them locally would warrant that approach.

The app is very pretty and has a fairly logical digital magazine layout divided into sections:  Dinner (which presumably is for dinner recipes), Search, Saved Recipes, Shopping List and More (which contains a login for a partner website ZipList, a set of local stores at which to find ingredients, and app information).  Recipes are organized by main ingredient, holiday, cooking method, and others, so they are easy to find.  Lists can be made with notes that detail the location of ingredients in the ailes of your favorite store.  But all of these sorts of features can already be had with many of the free recipe apps available in the App store.

My biggest issue is that this app commits what, in my mind, is the cardinal sin by charging for itself while running ads on it.  Having a partner site for tracking shopping lists is one thing.  Ads are another.

Admittedly, I am not one of Martha’s army of zombie homemakers which will one day rise up and conquer the world.  Perhaps this is the layout they want.  However it seems to me that you could get similar use from the Epicurious app and save yourself a buck.