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Article in App of the Week category.
Mela Makes Meal Planning Easy
Who doesn’t love a good minimalistic app. It’s so much more serene and pleasant to use versus some that are full of textures, ads, overlays,…
Who doesn’t love a good minimalistic app. It’s so much more serene and pleasant to use versus some that are full of textures, ads, overlays, and other nonsense that detracts from the use experience. Mela goes this route but it feels all the more jarring when you’re used to looking at recipes online. They are full of extraneous text, ads, links, and garbage just to hit some magical SEO quota.
Mela is a recipe and meal planning app that looks modern and clean while being packed with helpful features. You can add recipes manually or you can import them directly from the web. You can use the in-app browser to find and detect recipes or run the extension via Safari. Serving size, ingredients, images, steps, times, are all imported to the new recipe card. The same goes using the built-in scanner that users OCR to import recipes from your old recipe cards or cookbooks.
The app features an integrated calendar for you to plan out your families meals. With the meals on the calendar, you can populate a grocery list. What’s particularly interesting is that the app is actually using the native Apple Reminders app for these grocery lists, making them easy sync between devices and controllable via Siri.
As I mentioned, the UI is simple. It has a clean white background with contrasting black text. If you prefer, there’s a dark mode option too. At the top of each recipe you’ll see all the relevant info like cook time, prep time, and serving size. There are shortcuts to jump to cooking instructions and groceries. If you need to scale the recipe, you can do that too. When you go into cooking mode, the font size increases and the current step is bold while the preceding and upcoming steps are lightly grayed out.
Cooking doesn’t have to be a chore and having an easy, well-designed app to store, manage, plan, and cook your recipes certainly recuses the burden. This app has been a joy to use and makes cooking easy and fun. It’s a great utility to discover new recipes and ensure you actually get a chance to make them.
But enough about other people's apps.
