LeCoqRoti
A quiet Sunday afternoon, the kitchen counter crowded with cookbooks. You snap a photo of a handwritten recipe from a friend's notebook, open your Mac, and there it is — digitised, organised, and already synced to your phone for later. This is the kind of flow Mela is designed around.
Cooking mode: how does it handle multiple recipes?
It holds several recipes open at once, displayed with generous, readable text. Independent timers run inside the same view, so a sauce and a roast can count down side by side without switching screens.
Meal planning: what connects it to the calendar?
Mela uses Calendar.app for meal planning: drag a recipe onto a date and it appears as a standard event. No separate planner to learn, just the calendar you already use.
Scanning: can it handle a printed recipe?
Yes — point your camera at a page and Mela's text recognition extracts the ingredients and method. It also detects recipes on the current webpage, displaying them in its own clean browser for distraction-free reading.
Syncing: how does the iCloud sharing work?
Private iCloud syncing keeps your library updated across devices by default. A shared recipe library, available on macOS 12 and later, lets a household contribute to one collection.
A workflow: from torn-out page to weeknight dinner
Start with a physical recipe — the sort torn from a magazine, already creased and marked with yesterday's olive oil. Place it under good light and open Mela's scanning pane. The text recognition runs quickly; ingredients land in one field, the method in another, usually with only a stray line break to correct. Tap save and the recipe joins your library inside a category called "to try".
That evening, while the kettle boils, open the meal planner. Drag the new recipe onto Thursday's date. Calendar.app creates the event instantly — no import step, no extra dialogue. From the planner you can jump straight into cooking mode when Thursday arrives, the recipe already queued and ready for the larger text view.
A working session: prepping a weekend meal
Saturday morning, coffee in hand, you open Mela to gather three dishes for a small dinner: a starter, a main, and something for the friend who avoids dairy. The sidebar shows categories on the left — "weekend", "summer", "borrowed" — and the recipe list on the right. You mark two recipes as Favourites, then switch to the in-app browser.
The browser's recipe detection picks up a new one from a food blog you follow: the page loads with its usual clutter, but Mela offers a stripped-down view with just ingredients and steps. You read through it, decide it fits, and save it via the sharing extension. The whole session stays inside one window: browse, detect, read, save. No dragging URLs between apps, no copy-paste of scattered ingredient lists.
Fitting together: Mela and the rest of macOS
Mela leans on two system services that shape its feel: iCloud and Calendar.app. Because syncing is private by default, recipes appear on an iPad or another Mac without touching a third-party server. The calendar connection means a meal plan is visible in the same widget you use for appointments — Tuesday's pasta sits between a dentist visit and a deadline reminder.
The sharing extension reaches Mela from Safari or any app that sends a page. A recipe spotted on a cooking site at lunch becomes part of your library with a couple of clicks. Printing uses the standard macOS panel, so paper size, orientation, and PDF saving behave exactly as they do elsewhere on the system — no surprises in the print dialogue.
Categories and the Want to Cook list create a loose, personal filing system. There is no rigid taxonomy imposed; you shape the organisation as you go. A category for "baking" might hold thirty recipes, while "weeknight" stays lean at seven. The search field finds both titles and ingredient lines, helpful when you remember you have something with saffron but not which binder it lives in.
What changed: version 2.6.1 in daily use
The shared recipe library, introduced earlier in the 2.x line, now supports multiple iCloud users contributing to one collection — useful for a household where two people cook and shop separately. The requirement of macOS 12 for shared libraries is worth noting if one machine in the house runs an older system; private syncing still works across all devices on macOS 11.
The cooking mode timers gained a small but practical refinement: they persist when you switch between open recipes. A timer set for rice keeps running while you check the marinade steps on another tab. The text recognition, too, has been tuned — it handles the uneven typography of older cookbooks more reliably than earlier builds did, catching fractions and abbreviated measures that used to trip the parser.
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