GroceryZen - shopping lists on your iPhone

View in iTunes

App: GroceryZen
Released: 23rd August 2008
Developer: gbcb Software, Inc
Price: £2.99
Rating:


GroceryZen aims to be the solution to all your food shopping needs. It lets you build shopping lists by item and by recipe, sorts the items on the list by aisle, and lets you mark them as purchased.

Ever since my first smartphone (an HTC Wizard which is still going strong as my TomTom device while Apple gets its GPS act together) I've been looking for a simple, easy-to-use and feature-complete shopping list application. I had something for a while on the Wizard which let me do roughly what I wanted; select meals I wanted for the week ahead and ahve the ingredients collated and ordered relative to their location in the shop. This was a little bit hacky and the ordering was largely down to some manual crafty metadata tagging, but it worked and I found it useful (even if I did look a bit of a prat walking round Sainsburys with my mobile in my hand). Now GroceryZen brings that functionality to the iPhone, albeit in a much slicker package.



The app lets you add individuals items (either from the pre-programmed list of hundreds or by entering your own manually) or entire recipes (again either from the example list of three or by manually entering your favourite recipes).

It is the recipe functionality that makes this more than just another list app. You can add a short description of the recipe, a picture, and also a URL to full recipe instructions. Add to this functionality some nice integration work; the app integrates with the camera to let you add a photo to a recipe either from the camera itself or your photo library, and provides the standard red numerical indicator on the home page to alert you that there are items outstanding on the list.



So this app does absolutely everything I wanted of my shopping app three years ago. Unfortunately, time moves on and in this collaborative, "Web-2.0" world my expectations have moved on as well. I want to be able to discover and download recipes to the app from recipe websites and blogs, and I want to share my recipes with the world. Ok, so these are nice-to-have features, and maybe it is a bit much to ask for £2.99. But what about collaboration in building the list? I want to be able to share my shopping list with my partner, so she can add items to it when they occur to her, and I want those items to sync to the phone. I have this with my current iPhone shopping solution using ZenBe (review coming soon) and iGoogle, and if I switched now to a slotuion that doesn't have that ability, I would find myself in the dog house :)

Summary: A good effort, and the best food-shopping-specific list program I've seen so far. But to make it a killer app, it needs to take advantage of the net connection and introduce collaborative features to allow editting of the list on multiple computers.