Best shopping/grocery list app?

I bought 5 grocery apps until I got to one that I liked.

Pick & Choose Groceries: Not bad overall, but some of the categories are way off and you cannot change them. Too many categories, items don't tend to group up much. Categories are listed alphabetically and you can't change the order.

iNeedStuff: No categories at all this version, it is supposed to note the order that you check off items and then sort them accordingly the more you use it. If all works well eventually your list will be sorted in the same order as your store is laid out. If you have an iphone it uses gps or tower information to determine what store you are in to further help it with sorting. Seems like a good idea, but I have the touch and didn't care for the missing categories. Little more spendy than the others at $10, but they have it on sale right now for $5. Also, adding items with this one is the easiest, click an item to add it - clicking an item multiple times ups your quantity per click. The author of this app seems pretty cool and is pretty responsive on their website. The next version is supposed to add syncing between phones and a future one is supposed to add websyncing. He has feature voting in the app so that he can decide what features should get priority. App shows a lot of promise.

shopping list by Andrea Vettori: like ineedstuff this one is supposed to track items and list them in the order you pick them up in the store. Sounds cool, but I couldn't get it to work on my ipod. This one had the most cumbersome method of entering a grocery list. You have to add the item into your items list, and then click your shopping list and manually add that item in. Nothing is pre-entered so it's pretty time consuming. If you lost your data would probably be pretty frustrating to have to rekey everything back in.

Groceries by ontomni: too be honest, I have used this one the least. I'm not sure why, but I just didn't care for it.

Splash Shopper: Only one with desktop syncing so far. But it comes with a price: $30 for both iphone app and desktop program. The syncing is done via wifi and seems to work ok, though a lot of people seemed to have trouble with it on the forums. My biggest gripe is the mobile version seems rather dated. in portrait view you have to choose one thing besides item to view. So either I didn't know what aisle an item was in or I didn't know what quantity I needed. You can view up to 4 items in landscape view, but I don't care to shop holding my ipod on its side. And weirdly, units isn't one of the items you can display so you still have to kind of guess at it. If you want to be able to type your list in on your computer, this is currently your best choice. List is also sorted alphabetically either ascending or descending, so not necessarily going to follow your stores layout.

Shopper from Mid Century Software: This ones my favorite. To add an item you click the plus sign and start typing. As you type it searches whats currently in your items for a match and you can pick the best one. If nothing fits just click add and it takes you to the item edit screen. Right now you can just edit the category and add a note for an item (which you can use to put in quantities or just a bit more to help describe the item). The next version is supposed to add quantities, price, and units. If you prefer to browse for an item rather than search, you can do that too. In the ingrediant browser, if you click edit you can change the order that categories or displayed. So with a little bit of work you should be able to make your shopping list match up to your stores layout pretty well. I find Shopper to best offer features without over complicating things.

 

just one more thing to add, try clicking the website links in itunes. Lot of them offer more information and/or videos showing more about the program.

 

NeedFood

You might like to try NeedFood (The Visual Grocery List)

 

[app]Grocery IQ[/app]