Advenio is a small software company that started back in 1994 under the name of Gravity Software, and was incorporated as a LLC is 2002, and consists of two people, the ones that founded it - Michael Dupuis and Stephan Cleaves. These two guys have put up three programs so far - MacGourmet, MacXword and SQLGrinder, and today I want to tell you about the first one, because MacGourmet got a new version last week.

At Macworld, Advenio released a major update to its popular recipe, wine and cooking note organizer. According to its authors, MacGourmet is an "iTunes for recipes" that tries to bring recipe organization into the 21st century. Even better than just handling recipes, MacGourmet is able to save notes and labels for the wines you've had the pleasure to enjoy, creating a virtual "wine scrapbook". The interesting fact is that you can create links between wines and recipes, so you'll remember what kind of wine goes well with a certain recipe.

MacGourmet was designed using Cocoa, so it takes advantage of all those technologies that make Mac OS X so great, allowing you to change the layout themes or publish your recipes to your .Mac account, WebDAV disk or the local disk. Aside from the wine and cooking notes that I told you about, this program features smart lists and shopping lists, powerful search capabilities, the ability to use multiple windows or "chef view" for better on-screen view of your recipes, as well as having the power to import recipes from Meal-Master and MasterCook.

Available as a Universal Binary, the MacGourmet can be purchased for 24.95$, but a demo version can be downloaded for free. This program requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run properly and a .Mac account or WebDAV server for publishing your recipes online.