Lifestyle Technology In Plain English

Yes, look at that head­line. Gro­cery lists. In a tech blog. What’s this world com­ing to.

But yet, if you bear with me for a moment, you’ll under­stand why this is cool.

You see, if you throw an iPhone or iPod Touch into the mix, you’ll real­ize that ‘ah, maybe that Brad fellow’s on to something’.

So here’s the deal, for me the iPhone and iPod touch has not excelled at man­aging and shar­ing simple lists, like a gro­cery list. Which store car­ries what, and oh, is that what it’s really called or did you mean this. Con­fu­sion, at least for me, until we picked up (and shared via Apple’s iTunes Home Shar­ing sys­tem) Gro­ceryIQ.

Quite simply, Gro­ceryIQ is a list man­ager with a few cool bells and whistles:

• Auto-suggest: Start typ­ing and Gro­cery iQ will sug­gest gro­cery items you can quickly select.
• Bar­code scan­ning: Take a pic­ture of a bar­code with your iPhone cam­era to add an item to your list.
• Favor­ites and His­tory: Add fre­quently– or previously-purchased items to your list with just a few taps.

Behind the scenes, Gro­ceryIQ relies on a local (to the device) product data­base as well as updates which are hos­ted on the moth­er­ship — coupons.com.

When you’re build­ing a list, the app often calls home and tries to match the text you’re enter­ing with items it knows about. This is good, because I didn’t know there where quite that many vari­ants on Con­densed Milk.

1+1=5
Another cool fea­ture, and this is where it’s neat to have the app run­ning on two devices in the same house­hold. In this case it really does improve the usab­il­ity of the app when you share it. List shar­ing — from the FAQ:

You can share your list with mul­tiple people by send­ing an invit­a­tion to sync with them. If any­one with access to the list makes a change to it, everyone’s list will reflect that change. List shar­ing can be turned off at any time and will not delete or affect exist­ing lists. You can also invite more people to share a list at any time.

So by keep­ing your lists sync’d up, any­one at the gro­cery store can eas­ily see what’s miss­ing in the fridge.

And, since the Gro­ceryIQ also allows you to tag items as Favour­ites, it’s easy to build the list every week with com­monly pur­chased goods.

I know in our house­hold, since we’ve star­ted shar­ing the list, I’ve had a bet­ter suc­cess rate at the gro­cer by hav­ing a list that is actu­ally cur­rent

Oh, and this lively little app is only .99 at the iTunes App store.

Tagged as: Apple, application, Grocery, iPhone, iPod Touch, List, online, Review, sharing, sync

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