Review: forget nothing with Groceries for iPhone

There’s nothing worse than getting home from the grocery store and suddenly realizing you forgot something you needed. For those of us who aren’t accustomed to making lists, it happens frequently. Paper and pen are so pass?, though. Groceries, an iPhone/iPod touch app from Sophiestication Software, aims to remedy the problem by easily allowing users to make grocery lists using a huge database of name brand and generic products. We have been waiting since the App Store launched for this one, and it has finally been released. Was it worth the wait?

With Groceries, you can create and save multiple lists, which is useful if you do your shopping at more than one grocery store. Adding groceries to an existing list is a pleasure. The database of American items is gigantic with 11,259 items, while the German database is even larger with over 15,000 items. When all is said and done, the SQL database for the items is 2.6 MB—not huge, but when you consider it’s all text, that’s pretty big. Still, there are no real performance issues in the application, and scrolling is very smooth.

There are two ways users can add an item to their lists: by typing and picking from the real-time search results (amazingly with no performance hit), or by browsing through items by aisle. You can also add items to a favorites category, and the application keeps track of your history and items you add without an aisle. Once you select an item and put it in your grocery list, you can add notes and quantity, or switch the default aisle. Notes and default aisle, if edited through your list, are temporary changes; if you edit them through the item picking menu, the change becomes permanent. Adding a quantity is simple enough: a user simply types in an amount with the numeric keypad and then selects a label, such as boxes or gallons.

Manipulating your shopping list is fairly intuitive. You can delete items you no longer want, or simply touch one to cross it off your list with a red line. While the list might not appeal to everyone (it uses Marker Felt font), picky users can change to a different font in the application’s preferences. Further, you can add notes and move the aisle of an item from the list screen simply by touching the corresponding arrow on the right side. Conveniently, you can display your list in “all at once” mode or by selecting the “items remaining” feature, where only the groceries you have yet to put into your cart are displayed. Similarly, you can check or uncheck all your items by touching a button. Unfortunately, the image of the button that does this (in the lower left) doesn’t do a good job of communicating what it actually does.

My only real complaint with the application is that you can’t rearrange the order in which products appear on your list. They appear in aisle groups, which are fine because you can change an items aisle, but the order in which the aisles are displayed isn’t customizable. For instance, in my grocery store, produce is the last thing I get, as it is at the far end of the store. In Groceries, however, the produce aisle is the first aisle displayed. Currently, there is no way to customize this, but the developer has assured me that this feature is coming in a future version. I’m looking forward to that, as it will cut the time spent scrolling through my list significantly.