Well the Christmas season is finally over…my wife and I actually just took down all the decorations this evening in fact (an interesting task when you do it with a small child let me tell you). However, just because you are done buying Christmas presents doesn’t mean you aren’t shopping. This is America baby! We always find a reason to shop!

So, today we have a new tool that can help you stay organized: Shopping List by Adaptive Code (formerly Mojo Apps). Now I have reviewed several apps like this, and my current favorite has been easyShop because of its simplicity, but I have to say, Shopping List has taken the lead. Why? Actually the two apps are very similar, but Shopping List keeps the simplicity, but adds a few features that really kick it up a notch (or maybe two).

The purpose of Shopping List ($1.99 on the Catalog) is to organize your shopping. It does this by letting you create stores and lists that allow you to quickly queue up what you need to buy and mark them off as you make your purchases. The most common use for an app like this is definitely groceries, but it could be used for any type of shopping.

The first thing that Shopping List gets right is starting out. The biggest problem I had with easyShop was that when you first started up you had a blank slate…no stores, items, etc. You had to add it all in at the beginning. This wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming. Shopping List starts out with a default store that has over 600 items in it…or just about every “everyday item” you can think of (it didn’t have gorgonzola cheese though. Come on! Who doesn’t need some gorgonzola? Anyone? No? Just me…ok fine). Now TealShopper had something similar, so this isn’t unique, but it still is darn handy.

Furthermore, creating new lists has been greatly simplified with the addition of auto-completes. This means that if you have an item saved in a store (i.e. bananas), then when you create a list it will automatically popup when you start typing. Huge time saver there.

You also have the ability to create template lists. So lets say you have to get your prescriptions every month. You can create a medicine template, and when you are ready to go to the store you can add the medicine list to your main shopping list and poof, all of them come in with a couple of taps. Good stuff.

When you are ready to go shopping, you pull out the list you made and as you find your items, you just click the checkbox and it moves from Need to Have. You can switch between the two very easily so if you accidentally check the wrong item you can add it back in just a couple of taps.

Other cool features.

• Searching: If you need to find an item quick, you can click “All Items” for a store and start hunting.
• Pricing: It will help you total up your items if you enter in the prices. Personally, I this would take too much time and wouldn’t be worth the effort, but it is still nice that it has the option.
• Email and SMS: You can send your list to others by text or email. Nice.

One tiny problem I had, and this is probably because I am stupid, was when I manually added  a new item to a list.  There are two buttons, Add and Done, that are on the bottom of the screen. When I finished adding an item I would click Done because it was on the bottom right (where most commands are). Well, this means you are done adding items completely so it just closes out the add screen and doesn’t add your item. You are supposed to click Add then Done…I found this unintuitive. Maybe if both buttons were right aligned (and Done was named something different)? Or perhaps Done should save and close? Dunno, but I messed up a lot.