AnyMeal / News: Recent posts

AnyMeal is a free recipe database software developed using SQLite3 and Qt5. It can manage a cookbook with more than 250,000 MealMaster recipes, thereby allowing to import, export, search, display, edit, and print them. AnyMeal is available for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows.

After a long break the AnyMeal software was refreshed and it now uses the zero-configuration SQLite3 database and Qt5 for the user interface. The search interface was simplified. The software is now tested with more than 250,000 recipes instead of just 100,000 recipes ;)... read more

Minor bugfix for recipe selection.

AnyMeal is a recipe database front-end for GNU/Linux, which has been developed with C++, Qt, MySQL and Xalan-C.

MySQL 5.0 handles booleans in a different way which required a bugfix in AnyMeal (the bug was "SAXParseException: Invalid character (Unicode: 0x1)").

Also see:
* AnyMeal at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/anymeal/
* AnyMeal homepage: http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/anymeal-api/

There are minor feature enhancement for AnyMeal.

AnyMeal is a recipe database front-end for GNU/Linux, which has been developed with C++, Qt, MySQL and Xalan-C.

In this release the speed of recipe display was improved. A man page was contributed by Sandro Tosi.

Also see:
* New Release: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=118143&package_id=128943&release_id=458722
* AnyMeal at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/anymeal/
* AnyMeal homepage: http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/anymeal-api/

There are minor feature enhancement and bugfixes for AnyMeal.

AnyMeal is a Cookbook database front-end for GNU/Linux, which has been developed with C++, Qt, MySQL and Xalan-C.

Many Mealmaster recipes have leading whitespaces in the instructions block. The reason for this is that the Mealmaster file-format does not properly separate the ingredients- from the instructions-block. The version 0.29 of AnyMeal now properly ignores this whitespaces. AnyMeal 0.29-2 furthermore recognises lines consisting only of whitespaces as paragraph-breaks. It is recommended to reimport such Mealmaster-files.... read more

There is a major feature enhancement for AnyMeal.
AnyMeal is a Cookbook database front-end for GNU/Linux, which has been developed with C++, Qt, MySQL and Xalan-C.

AnyMeal now can setup and start an embedded MySQL server and connect to it using a file-socket. The user is not required to set up a MySQL server any more. AnyMeal now is really easy to set up even for users, who are not familiar with MySQL!... read more

AnyMeal now can directly import ISO-8859-1-encoded Mealmaster files.

AnyMeal is a Cookbook database front-end for GNU/Linux, which has been developed with C++, Qt, MySQL and Xalan-C.

AnyMeal now can recode ISO-8859-1 Mealmaster files to UTF-8 on the fly. Furthermore the import dialog displays mime-type information about the selected files to help the user determine the character-set.
That means, it is not necessary any more to convert Mealmaster files to UTF-8 on the command-line.
These new features have been implemented using the recode- and magic-library.... read more

The database software now can handle floating point numbers as well as fractions.

AnyMeal is a Cookbook database front-end for GNU/Linux, which has been developed with C++, Qt, MySQL and Xalan-C.

anymeal-0.24 now supports fractions as well as floating point numbers for amounts of ingredients. E.g. instead of "2.33333 liter water" you can now use "2 1/3 liter water". The recipe display looks much nicer like this.... read more

I'm happy to announce, that anymeal is open source software of the day 7.10.2005 at moongift.jp: http://oss.moongift.jp/intro/i-739.html

Editing of recipes has been improved with the new release of AnyMeal. AnyMeal is a Cookbook database front-end for GNU/Linux, which has been developed with C++, Qt, MySQL and Xalan-C.

The recipe-editor now allows to change the order of categories, ingredients and instructions.

With the database-wizard the user now can start importing recipes right after the database has been created.

More page-breaks have been added to the "Formatted Object" export. After converting the FO-file with "fop", the generated PDF has a page-break after each category-chapter.... read more

This month a recipe database has been choosen by the sourceforge-team as project of the month. Unfortunately it's not AnyMeal but Gourmet ;)
Congratulations to Thomas Hinkle.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/grecipe-manager/

The new configure-script should be able to detect docbook on most Linux-distributions. If your Linux-distribution has an alternate location for the docbook-xsl-scripts, let me now.
AnyMeal is participating in the web-demo against software-patents in Europe.

This is an example of what you could encounter in a Mealmaster-file in two-column format:

1 tb sugar -for me
1 tb salt 1 l water

The "-for me" is meant as a continuation for "sugar".

This is wrong! Actually it has to be like this:

1 tb sugar 1 tb salt
-for me 1 l water

AnyMeal-0.17 has been fixed accordingly. It is recommended to reimport the Mealmaster-files.

The documentation about recoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 was wrong.
You need to do "recode latin1..utf8" (not "recode pc..utf8").
Regarding CR-LF-sequences: These are tolerated by recent versions of AnyMeal and you don't need to worry about this any more.

The new version of AnyMeal supports exporting recipes as FO-file (formatted objects).
If you install Apache's FO-processor (http://xml.apache.org/fop/), you'll be able to convert this FO-file to a PDF-file.
FOP still has problems with memory-consumption. So don't try to create cookbooks with more than 200 recipes for the moment :-(

Mandrake 10.1 doesn't come with libxalan-c18 for some reason. If you have some experience however, you can compile the Xalan-C library yourself.
I put a step-by-step guide at
http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/anymeal-api/faq.html#faqInstallation3
Enjoy!

AnyMeal now offers persistent selections. This means, that the user can keep track of her/his favorite recipes.
Databases created with AnyMeal-0.12-2 will get updated accordingly.
The pre-alpha phase has finished. The alpha-phase will focus gaining stability and implementing necessary features, which may be found to be missing.

Mealmaster-users will remember the useful functionality for selecting recipes.
Currently work is being undertaken to add this functionality to AnyMeal.

Another big mistake. The recipe-instructions where getting lost, when handling recipes with the modified XML-format. Sorry about that!

The bug (GUI doesn't allow exporting erroneous recipes properly) has been fixed.

The Mealmaster-compiler has been revised. Database import of AnyMeal-0.11 is 10% faster. Unfortunately I introduced some bugs, so that the GUI doesn't allow exporting erroneous recipes properly.
Irrespective of this, I expect to be able to change the project's status to "Alpha" pretty soon.

AnyMeal 0.10 includes a wizard for setting up recipe-databases.
Because of problems with unixODBC under Mandrake, AnyMeal now is connecting directly to MySQL-databases.
The passwords for accessing the databases are stored safely using kde-wallet.
All this has made AnyMeal much more user-friendly!
Enjoy!

The book "C++ GUI Programming" written by Jasmin Blanchette is coming with a CD-ROM with a non-commercial edition of Qt and a free Borland C++ compiler.
If someone is interested to compile AnyMeal under Windows, I'd be interested. At the moment I'm concentrating on AnyMeal 1.0 for GNU/Linux.
However there are problems to be expected with Apache-Xalan and under Windows there is no concept of software-packaging. Developing a installer with Nullsoft-Installer would be a possibility to solve this problem.

The new pre-alpha release of AnyMeal comes with the recipe-editor, which is still under testing.
There also is a Mandrake-rpm now. Feed-back is welcome, as I don't have root-access to a Mandrake system.

I was very happy to see AnyMeal being mentioned in a newspaper for the first time (see http://www.boz.ch/artikel_42696.html\) and this in a positive way ;-)
By the way: I never eat chips and seldom eat pizza, when I'm working on the computer. I have a well equiped kitchen and I'm using it quite often.
My favorite are easy recipes (like curry chicken with rice). On christmas I made fried rice-balls with prawn and mozarella. I also did "Florentiner Apfeltorte" quite often.
There's one thing however: I seldom improvise, because I'm not good at it. I rather try to learn following sophisticated recipes.
Thanks Mr. Born!

The search query has been improved. The recipes are ordered by a number, which takes into account the amount of ingredients not being available AND the amount of ingredients being left unused.
This new search query meets your expectations much better.
The new search query will be included in the 0.9 release.