Review: Video Cookbook

Are you an amateur chef? Do you enjoy cooking, but don’t always have a recipe idea? If you go and browse the App Catalog, there are very few recipe apps that aren’t made by Brighthouse Labs.

If you like getting cooking recipes from cooking shows, then maybe Video Cookbook by forwebOS.com ($0.99 in the App Catalog) is for you.

If you aren’t familiar with forwebOS.com, they are the same dev shop that have made a few other popular apps including ActiveCard 2.0 and aniWeather. The one thing that I’ve come to expect from this developer is a good user interface (UI). Video Cookbook does not disappoint.

Let’s be sure to get this next point out of the way first. The name of the app is Video Cookbook. That’s what you get, videos. If you can get past the fact that there are no written recipes, then this app is worth checking out.

When you first launch the app, you are presented with a nice looking main screen. From this main screen you have a few ways to start looking for new recipes. You can search all of the videos or look for recipes in a specific category. When you go to the Video Recipes section, you are able to browse these categories. There is everything from Appetizers to Salads to BBQ to Desserts. The videos come from multiple different sources. The most notable one is The Food Network.

After you browse through the categories and click on a recipe that you are interested in, you are brought to another scene that lets you play the video (which brings up the video in the YouTube app), email the recipe (sends a link to the YouTube video), or mark the recipe as a favorite. As long as you can follow the cooking instructions on the video, you should be set. If there was a way to make notes about a recipe you are interested in, that would be a definite plus.

Your other option for finding recipes is by using the search option. Type in the keyword you are looking for and the app gives you recipes that match. When you find the recipe that you are looking for, you can play the corresponding video. If you like the recipe, and want to mark it for later, you can. The slightly confusing part about this is that instead of being able to mark a recipe as a favorite (like in the categories section), you are saving it. Back on the home screen, you have the option to view the recipes that you marked as your favorites and a separate way to look at the recipes that you have saved. I don’t really get the point of having these as separate sections, and I would think that it would be more user-friendly to just merge them into one.

In addition to all of the recipes that you can look through Video Cookbook also offers cooking tips. These tips all come from ExpertVillage.com (which is now part of eHow.com). There are tips on everything from how to chop garlic to how to marinate tofu. As with all of the recipes, you’ll be viewing these tips on YouTube.

As with some of the other apps by forwebOS.com, Video Cookbook doesn’t use all of the standard webOS UI elements. Most other apps have an app menu up in the top left corner. Instead of that, this app has the control bar at the bottom of the screen. There is a home button, a favorites button, a search button, and an info button. I was able to find a few bugs with this app. When you bring up the info menu, you cannot get to any of the other parts of the app by hitting the menu buttons. They don’t seem to work. The only thing that brought me back to the main screen was a back gesture. The other bug that I found was a bit more glaring. Video Cookbook runs in full screen mode. There were a few times when I was using the app and I received an audio notification, but the visual notification was hidden from me. That is something that will need to be fixed in a future update.

Learn more about Video Cookbook on appRoundup.