Crazy Apple News Site

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Answered Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

This week: Mariner Software’s most non-baseball-related program: MacGourmet.

Q: I really want to learn to cook Julia Child.

A: You mean cook like Julia Child.

Q: No, no. I said it right.

A: Next!

Q: I have many hundreds of recipes. But I also have the worst memory.

A: What makes you say that?

Q: What makes me say what? No, only kidding. Seriously. I’ll make some awesome soup–

A: Mmmmmmm…. Sooooup…. Gaaaaaahhhhhh….

Q: Focus!

A: Hmm, yes, sorry. So, you make some awesome, delicious, wholesome, soul-warming, thick and tasty potato soup with bacon and chives…

Q: Hey! No, I usually make vegetable soup or minestrone. And it’ll turn out well, but two weeks later I don’t remember what I did and I have to make up the recipe from scratch.

A: Well, I have the answer to all your problems, friend! Try MacGourmet! Not only does it store, categorize, and allow you to publish your recipes to the web¹, but it also calculates nutritional data for all your chowders, consommés, mulligatawnies, minestrone, noodle soups, rice soups, stews, broths, cream soups…

Q: And casseroles!

A: Wha? Huh? Oh, yeah, sure, if you can call a casserole cooking.

Q: I can and do, my friend.

A: You know what casserole is? It’s soup gone wrong. It’s lazy soup. It’s soup without the love. Casserole, bah!

Q: Will MacGourmet help me categorize my casseroles?

A: Sure! Sure! Why not? Do whatever you like! I suppose you can store your favorite recipe for rat poison in there too, but that doesn’t make it right.

Q: What about roasts? Are you okay with roasts?

A: With gravy?

Q: Yes.

A: Carry on.

Q: So, can I use MacGourmet to keep track of my different recipes for roasts, and sort them by the person from whom I learned the recipe?

A: Yes. It’s good at things like that. And it will help you plan out your meals for the week and generate a shopping list so you can buy everything you need in one fell swoop.

Q: Hey, that’s great!

A: Yeah! so, let’s say you were going to make Arroz Caldo. It would tell you how much ginger you needed, how much rice, how much chicken, how much broth… How long to cook the rice to get it niiice and tender, but not mushy, how to delicately season the chicken…

Q: Yep!

A: How to serve the dish on a rainy day, so that it warms the soul of the person eating it…

Q: That’s just what I’ll do!

A: *sigh* Namimiss ko naman. Babalik sana ako.²³

1. with MobileMe account, sold separately [↩]
2. Ano? Hindi ka mauronong managalog? [↩]
3. What? you don’t speak Tagalog? [↩]

Ladies and gentlemen¹, we are just as pleased as punch to bring you our first ever Guest Editorial, and boy do we have a great one to start out with. Yes, today we are proud to publish wit and wisdom from beyond the grave. We present the undead father of Open Source, a great man and now a great zombie, please put your keyboards together for Zombie Richard M. Stallman!

BRAAAAINS! BRAAAAAAINSSSS! Hahaha, sorry, little zombie joke there.

Thank you, Mr. Dickson, for that lovely introduction. By the way, “Zombie Richard M. Stallman” is my mundane name, you all can call me ZRMS.  Yes, I return from an untimely death, pushed upon me by that cowardly Raymond and separatist Torvalds to let the people of the world of the living know what I think about your software development strategies.  The advantage of death is that it unclouds your vision and frees your thinking.  Suddenly I understand the appeal of Java to developers and, while I don’t agree with it, I see why so many users use Windows. But most of all I have come to love what I thought I would always hate: your little “Mac” computers.

I always thought that Macs were just toys for the closed-source bourgeoisie, playthings for the rich and unenlightened. But suddenly CARS is funny², and  now I see the beauty, the symmetry of using a closed source mach system on top of the stable, reliable, open source Unix foundation.  I see the elegance of two licenses for each piece of software, the beauty of not knowing when your next update will be coming out.  I also see all people as basically walking delicatessens, but again, that’s a zombie thing.

So does that mean that I, the reanimated corpus of RMS, have started using an iMac to do all my otherworldly programming and checking my email?  No.  I use the real æthernet, a network the likes of which you mortals cannot comprehend, to transmit my thoughts as data structures directly to those that need them.  It’s like wireless, but far, far spookier and cooler. Also we get, like, 9800GBps transfer rates, so my BitTorrent ratio has gone up quite a bit.

Sorry, wandered a bit from my point there.  My point is that there is so much more to worry about in life other than how “open” your license is, how much you can do to absolutely mod your OS to your exact tastes, and that all the time we spent being rabid about the Firefox logo not being 100% free seems kinda silly now.  I mean, eventually you have to use that computer for something, right? Sure Gentoo kicks Windows all round the block in terms of speed and stabilizability, and sure freedom of computers is important, and someone needs to keep Microsoft in check, but there does come a point where enough is sufficient, and you just need to stop recompiling your kernel and write that thesis paper you’ve been avoiding all semester.

I don’t know why I didn’t think this way when I was alive.  Chemicals, probably.  When you’re alive you have all this adrenalin, testosterone, endorphins, and all that other chemical muck swilling around inside of you, screwing up your thinking and making you want to hit things all day long.  Or something.  Ever since I was brought back to this plane by that itinerant Voodoo priest my memories of my past life are somewhat confused.  I mean, I know that I didn’t like someone called Bill Gates, and every once in a while I suddenly remember  being really happy writing code to be compatible with the 80386 processor, but I don’t really remember why I did like 80386′s and didn’t like Gates.

Guess what I use computers for now. Go on, guess.  I use them to tell really awesome zombie jokes.  Wanna hear some?  C’mon, be a sport. No?  Fine. Be that way. I’ma go eat Steve Ballmer’s brain.  I could use a light snack.

HA! Sneaked a zombie joke right past you! ZING!

No, okay, I was being serious. I’m hungry. Later, fruit lovers.

1. or to judge from our comments: Lady and Gentleman [↩]
2. had to sneak a trackback link in here somewhere [↩]

In keeping with the current trend in the Apple blogging community, I present the CANS predictions for WWDC: What Would Doogie Create.  

Rumors of iPhones, new arctic cats and changes to mini Me aside, we predict that Apple is poised to take over yet another major market: the pastry industry.  Yes, the main “one other thing” presentation point will be: the Pie¹.

“Steve has been working really hard on this,” says Phil Shiller. “He’s been up all night for weeks, getting the crust just right, working on the recipe for the filling, even testing various new frozen delights for Pie a la mode.  It’s called iCream now, by the way.”

Reports from the Apple campus report that beta versions of the Pie were “scrumptious, but not yet insanely scrumptious” and that Steve has been worried about getting it ready on time for WWDC, fearing that pushing back such a major announcement would hurt their stock value by as much as .001 points.

We believe that–at this time–there will not be an SDK for the Pie, and that consumers will have to enjoy only the apples that Apple sees fit to put in the pie.  At this release, the Pie will come in three varieties: Bramley, Granny Smith, and, surprisingly, Jonagold.

We have yet to verify rumors that Microsoft is working on a wireless “Zune Pie”.

1. Note to Windows users: on a Mac, those question marks are Apple icons.  Sorry your fonts suck like that. [↩]