My understanding is that the Hiku needed to work with an Evernote or a Remember the Milk-type service in order to use it. I was saying I really dislike those two services, so I was hoping Ziplist might be added as a possibility. That's all.


Mighty Grocery looks pretty good, but I think I prefer Ziplist for a few reasons, one of the biggest being that the web portion of the service doesn't seem tacked-on like it does with Mighty Grocery. It looks like they just added that. I also think they're really missing out by not giving potential users any screenshots of that web interface. When I went to look at it all I got was a login page that told me to go download the app and sign up for an account on the phone. That's really not the way to go.

But I agree on the shared shopping lists. My wife and I do the same thing, and it's extremely convenient.

Some of my favorite things about Ziplist, since we're on this topic:

Stores: I can set up several stores that I frequently go to. As a part of this, I can tell Ziplist the aisle order of the stores, then when I have the app open I can specify which store I'm in, and my list will get re-ordered for that store, making it possible to make a single sweep through the grocery store. Fantastic!

Recipe storage: I can add recipes to Ziplist, including all the relevant details and most importantly the included ingredients. Then I can click on recipe and tell the service to add all the ingredients to my shopping list. It gives me a chance to deselect items before it goes ahead with it, and at the same time auto-deselects items Ziplist thinks I might already have on hand based on previous shopping trips. Pretty neat.

More recipes: I can add recipes from the web. There's a Ziplist Chrome extension that will scan the page you're on for a recipe (Foodnetwork.com, for example) and add it to your recipe box. Some sites, like Martha Stewart for example (surprisingly good site for inexpensive, easy to make, tasty meals, BTW) have Ziplist functionality built in.

The app: the main thing I actually don't like is the look of the app. I think it's a little low-res and not designed for a wide variety of screen resolutions. That said, I do like how it works. Adding items is easy, and checking them off is too. I like that when I check something off, it's moved to the bottom of the list. That way it's out of the way so I can see what I still need, but I can refer back to it to double check that I got everything I need. This is great for something like the product section. I'll go through the produce, checking things off as I go. These items drop to the bottom of my list, and I only see the produce items I have yet to get. Then when I think I'm done with the produce section, I double-check the items in my physical and virtual carts. Once I'm certain I didn't forget anything, I "checkout," clearing the items in the virtual cart.

The app again: one place where that stores functionality becomes important is that I can assign items to specific stores. That way I can plan to stop at three places, but when I go into one of them I only see the items on my list that I want to get from that store.


So there's my mini-review. Clearly I'm a fan of Ziplist, but mostly I'm a fan of moving this kind of list-making into the digital space.


But for some reason my brain hates these kinds of list. I always tend to miss at least one item on paper lists, despite double- and triple-checking at the end of the trip...