We’ve released SousChef 1.2.2 (v643) to address a crash that some users were experiencing when searching the cloud. This update is available via auto-update or for downloading here.
Just to note, the crash was due to a change in the GCC 4.2 tool chain that only occurs when building on 10.5.x (the versions of SousChef that were built using GCC 4.2 on Snow Leopard don’t exhibit the same crash).
On Wednesday, SousChef’s online recipe database passed 100,000 recipes. This represents an order of magnitude more recipes than I ever though might be submitted in the first year of the product’s life. This number of recipes brings SousChef onto the same level, in terms of amount of content and in our opinion vastly superior in terms of user experience, with some of the medium size recipes sites. This is something I never really expected to happen. Ever. But definitely not in the first year. This huge amount of growth has not come without growing pains—we continue to work on improving search performance, both in speed and accuracy, and are working to add more features to the cloud.
Because this is such an important milestone for SousChef, I want to share some stats to illustrate the current size of the cloud:
SousChef now has over 30,000 active users, of which almost 4,000 have contributed recipes. This works out to each contributing user adding, on average, 25 recipes. In reality, many contribute more—our largest contributing user alone has added a staggering 20,315 recipes. To cook every recipe in the database it would take you 92 years cooking 3 courses per meal per day. Lastly, the recipes in the cloud contain references to roughly 1.1 million ingredients, bringing the the cloud to an average of 11 ingredients per recipe. I don’t know about you, but I am stunned by some of these stats.
In closing I just want to say thank to all our users and we hope to continue making a it easier and more fun for you to cook with you computer (and soon iPhone!) going forward.
In other news: We have a couple other projects and possibilities in the cards so stay tuned for more info!
Users trying to search the SousChef recipe cloud today (Saturday May 16th) may have experienced no search results. This was caused by corruption in the recipe cloud due to optimizations put in place to better handle search load. We’ve been working to fix the issue and now have the cloud back online without any loss of data.
We are instituting stricter testing methodology for the future so that an issue like this, should it ever happen again, will be detected quickly which would have made the diagnosis and fix more straight forward.
Our sincere apologies. Thanks for bearing with us.
We’ve been getting a lot of e-mails about users having trouble using the cloud – search results are extremely slow, or nonexistent. We believe the lag in search results had to do with SousChef’s recipe cloud being overloaded during the final days that the MacHeist bundle was on sale. The rapid increase in users means that our recipe cloud is growing by leaps and bounds – the cloud has grown to over 40,000 recipes, which is amazing! But such swift growth led to some serious delays.
We’re pleased to report that we did a lot of performance work on the cloud over the past several nights, and things should be greatly improved. That being said, if you’re still not receiving any results from the cloud, keep reading. Licenses were being generated through MacHeist at such a fast pace that we’ve discovered that some were not correctly added to the cloud, which is why some users may still not see search results since your license key is used to verify your access to the cloud. We’ve since created all of the missing accounts. If you are one of the people who are experiencing this issue, simply double check that your license key is entered correctly and then clear your username from the General pane of SousChef’s preferences by clicking “Edit Username…”, deleting the existing username and clicking “OK”. You may then enter a new username or use the same one by clicking “Edit Username…” again.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience, if you continue to have trouble please don’t hesitate to contact our support team.
It’s been 24 hours since the MacHeist reveal, and the recipe cloud has already jumped to over 12,000 recipes – at the time of the reveal yesterday, there were only about 8,400! According to MacHeist.com, over 18,000 bundles have been sold so far, which means that over $150,000 has been raised for charity. And there are still 13 days to go!
We’ve been hearing from a lot of users about features they’d like to see in SousChef, especially metric support and general international compatibility. We read every e-mail and take all feedback into consideration. Metric support and an iPhone app are at the top of our list. We’re taking our time so that the future versions of SousChef are something you can fully enjoy – and something we can be proud of. But by all means, keep the suggestions coming! Send any ideas for features you would (or wouldn’t) like to from this knowledge-base article.
Keep on importing!
