Basil 2.0 Adds Background Timers, Smart Recipe Filters, Awesome iOS 7 Redesign

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Recipe View

Basil, still hands-down my favorite recipe app for the iPad, is going 2.0 just in time for iOS 7. And man, if you thought the original was clean, slick and easy to use, then you’re going to be blown away by v2.0, which developer Kyle Baxter tells me is “basically an entire new app.”

Basil is the virtual version of your recipes notebook and clippings folder. You can search most good recipe sites from within the app, or use a bookmarklet to send a page from Safari to Basil, and then use the app’s importer to grab the ingredients, directions and even pictures of the dish. This part hasn’t changed, but the interface of your recipe browser and viewer is all new, and way nicer.

Filters!
Filters!
Photo: Cult of Mac

The layout is cleaner, with no tab or drawers: just your text; ingredient list on the right, directions on the left. Navigation is now done via the text “buttons” up top, which let you make smart searches ion the fly: Tap the “meals” button and check off, say, soup and salad. Then hit the “cuisines” button and check Spanish. Your grid of thumbnails updates automatically to comply with your selections; in this case all Spanish soup and salad recipes. You can even filter by source, so it’s easy to find all your Serious Eats burger recipes.

That alone would be enough, but Kyle has also fixed up the timers. Any time a timer appears in the recipe, you can tap it and use it as an actual countdown timer. Now you can run multiple timers together, and they will keep running in the background. Thus you can bake a cake and safely pour yourself a martini whilst skimming the day’s news on your iPad, and the alert will sound when the cakes are done.

In all, Basil 2 looks like a fantastic update to an already great app (it has been my recipe book of choice since launch). It should be in the App Store any time now, pending approval.

Source: Basil App
Thanks: Kyle

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