Shopping List

We’ve all been guilty of heading to the shops and leaving the shopping list at home at the cost of our pockets, time and inconvenience. Fortunately this needn’t be the case any longer thanks to this useful Shopping List application.

As we all have mobile phones these days and never go far without them, it seems a sheer stroke of genius that someone’s finally combined the idea and functionality of the mobile and the ability to scribble ideas and notes down for you to remember. Although it seems a simple idea to do, I’ve seen so many simple ideas develop into sludgy and useless programmes. Having said that, I’m relieved to report this isn’t such an instance and can give it two thumbs up for practical use and simplistic, workable design. This is great for both experienced mobile users and those who really seldom use their mobile phones for anything but receiving the odd call now and then!

Colour co-ordinated for ease of use you can input the name, quantity and any notes as well as use up to eight different colours to help you define the list further. For example, you can highlight treats, essentials and gifts etc. It’s up to you to decide what the colours mean – again more helpful than pigeon-holing them to mean specific things.

The controls are very clearly shown and responsive. The up, down, left and right controls works well, as does the use of OK to select the appropriate item from the list. And yes, should you wish to use the number pad to do the same operation, you can.

You have a menu which offers six options, add, edit, clear, help, about and exit. The add option obviously opens up an input form (the main ones to know are the first three). Edit allows you to update or correct some details on a selected item. Clear will remove the item from the list permanently, but don’t worry, should you click this by accident, it will pop up in a new window ‘are you sure?’ which you can then accept or decline – again well done to the designers for making it such a thoughtfully produced programme – they really did their homework!

Overall then, I can’t really fault this programme nor would I want to! Anything that makes shopping more cost effective and helpful is a definite winner for me. The only thing that I would say which I’d have liked to have seen is predicted text or T9 functionality. If this programme could utilise the phones own dictionary function rather than use its slightly slow and clunky input system, I’d have been very happy. However, this is still a well rounded product and does everything else well and indeed is competent throughout.

Another thing that would have been useful to include is the function to save a shopping list as a template – such as milk, bread, eggs and so on would be loaded as normal and could then be omitted or added to suit. This would help prevent having to use the rather cumbersome input system further than patience would allow. It automatically deletes the item once you’ve checked it off the list which is a small oversight. Again, being able to save this for future shopping lists would have been much better in my opinion.

Rating 80%

Positives

Simple and effective

Made for everyone to use

Negatives

Colours could have been bolder so those with poorer vision could use it

The input function’s a little sluggish and frustrating – especially if you text a lot due to its speed being very slow

Can’t back up or store shopping lists or templates to use in future (other than not checking them off the list as this would inevitably erase them off the list)