Grocery List App for the Iphone

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So remember back when the plague of biblical proportions descended upon my house and we all laid in bed for two weeks with nary a stirring?  Well, one of the times that I got up to check my email and drink a cup of tea and swig from the Delsym bottle, I received an email from an app developer inquiring as to whether I would like to review his grocery list app.

The email made me giggle because the developer was kind enough to point out all the things he thought I wouldn’t like about his app, yet he wanted me to review it anyway.  I downloaded the app*, then promptly went back to bed.  When I woke up about a week later, there it was on my iPhone, patiently waiting for me.

The app is called Grocery List and it’s developed by Helium Foot (I love that name, don’t you?)

Now here’s the thing; he’s right – it doesn’t do a lot of the the things that I was looking for, however it was almost exactly what my husband was looking for as he’s more of a “get it done and let’s move on” kind of guy.

Open the app and you’re taken directly to the “Make a List” screen. What’s nice about this is that you can scroll by letter, or type in the search field and it updates as you type. Click the plus sign next to an item and it increases the quantity.  Tap the name of the item and a minus sign, trash can  and an arrow show up; the minus sign decreases the quantity and the trash can brings it back to zero…

the arrow lets you determine what aisle the item can be found in, default quantities (if you always buy 2 loaves of bread for instance) and add any notes you might want to connect to the item.

Items that you add most often are stored in an additional list called “My Common Items” for quick staple shopping.

The grocery list that comes with the app is exhaustive (Absinthe?  I love pretending that I might buy Absinthe!).  However, if you need to add things you can do that too, as well as what aisle it should be in and of course the notes and default quantities.

Speaking of aisles, that’s fully customizable as well.  You can arrange the aisles to fit your favorite store as well as create and delete your own aisles.

One of my favorite features of the app occurs when you’re out shopping.  As you check each item off your list, instead of deleting it, it adds them to your “cart”, this way if I think, “Oh I need half and half!” and I don’t know if I had it on my list or if it’s in my overflowing cart already, I can just look at the app and see if I’ve already gotten it. (I can’t tell you how useful I find this – I tend to do 30 things at once and I can’t remember everything, you know!)

The most interesting thing about this app is its Help section.  Click on a subject and you have short video clips with audio of screen shots explaining step by step how to complete the task that you’re not sure about.

All in all, I found this to be exactly what the developer said it was, a powerful grocery list app with a clean design and an intuitive interface with one of the best Help sections I’ve ever come across in any kind of software. The one thing I’d add is the ability to email my grocery list, or share it somehow with another user.

*Full Disclosure: I received a promotional code for 1 (one) copy of Grocery List app from the developer for this review.

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