Spice Rack
Developer: Novel Approach Limited
Cost: $1.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: http://novelapp.net
If you’ve been reading the news lately, you’ve probably seen something about “content farms,” a term describing websites that do nothing but aggregate content or pay pennies to produce garbage content that capitalizes on popular search terms. If there is such a term for mobile apps, Spice Rack would fall within that definition.
In short, Spice Rack is little more than a bookmark to Wikipedia, and I’m the sucker who paid two bucks to find that out. That’s not to say this app has no value (barely), but I already have a mobile browser and can get every ounce of this information quickly and easily without this app—for free.
So what are you paying for? When you open the app there are two buttons you can click: a toolbox in the bottom right-hand side of the screen or a stack of cards in the top right. The card stack displays three categories: Herbs and Spices, Spice Mixes, and Indian Spices. Click on any one of these and you are presented with a list of spices. Click on the spice and you’re taken to the Wikepedia entry (staying within the app).
From the Wikipedia page, you can navigate forward and backward like your regular browser, pull up an Outline of the Wiki entry for quick navigation, save the page for quick reference later on, or click on the toolbox button. The toolbox allows you to search within the entry, view your saved pages, view all Wiki entries or view the app’s settings, which offers very little.
Since this app is accessing the web, you must have Internet connection. There is a feature that allows you to download spice entries for offline viewing. However, since you’re most likely to use this app for reference, how would you know what to look up and download until you actually had a question? Who wants to guess at the spices they’d like to know about later?
You can do a few other things in this app like create folders for your saved spices and change font size, but overall there’s no way I would recommend this Spice Rack to anyone who knows how to search the Internet. Like a spoonful of cinnamon, I just can’t swallow it.
Toque Rating: 1.5/5
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