Monday, January 20, 2003
Shopping Smart with VOShoppingList 3.2
Posted by Philip Colmer in "SOFTWARE" @ 12:00 PM
Regular supermarket shoppers generally use a list of some sort, often written on a scrap of paper. That goes against the grain of a true PDA user – after all, it is hardly a high tech solution! Shopping list software has the advantage of being reusable and often offers other features. Has VOShoppingList, a Pocket PC Awards 2002 Finalist, got what it takes to handle my weekly shopping needs?
VOShoppingList is a Pocket PC Awards 2002 Finalist and has received promising reviews on the Handango Web site. In practice, though, it has flaws that are quite readily discovered in real-life use.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for $14.95 (affiliate link). There is a 10-day trial version available. After the trial is over, you can purchase the software or install AdWare which will play a 7 second commercial before the program starts. There is a desktop version of the software that is available free to registered owners of the Pocket PC version.
Strong shopping feature set
VOShoppingList has a comprehensive list of features that looks good compared with that old piece of paper:
Figure 1: Main screen for VOShoppingList
Setting up the shopping list
The first thing that needs to be done is to add items to the list. The user interface is quite straight forward:
Figure 2: Adding an item to your shopping list
From here, you can enter your information into the appropriate categories, outlined above.
A new category can be added by clicking on the <New Category> entry. Categories in general are managed through the Category window.
Figure 3: Managing your categories
The Location window has an identical look and feel for those location names that don't fit into the supplied method of a number in the 1 - 30 range. However, only the first two characters of the location text are displayed in the main display.
Once you've built up a list of items, you can enter "Choose items" mode to decide which entries in that list you actually want to buy. Here, everything starts off as being present on your list. Clicking on an item in the list greys it out and removes it from the list:
Figure 4: Choosing items for shopping
While in this mode, you can incremently increase or decrease the quantity by clicking in the quantity column rather than having to open the whole item window – a useful shortcut.
If you've got more items on your list than will fit on a single screen, you can move through the list by clicking on the turned corner icons.
Going shopping
As you do your shopping, getting the items on the list, you mark the items off by simply clicking on the description. This puts a line through the item (as shown in figure 1).
However, because the item remains visible, the screen can become cluttered, making it hard to see what you've got left to buy. The software allows for an alternative, which is to hide the purchased items. This mode is toggled on and off by clicking on the shopping trolley icon. One frustration of this otherwise useful feature is that you can only turn it on after you've selected at least one item.
You can further manipulate the way the software displays your shopping list by filtering the category shown, from all items down to individual categories. You can also sort the location or the description by clicking on the column heading, with the current sort being bolded.
Gotchas
There are, however, some very irritating bugs in the software.
There is no doubt that using a PDA to manage a shopping list can offer big advantages over more "traditional" methods such as scraps of paper. VOShoppingList goes a long way to supply and support those advantages, but it is let down by bugs and a poor user interface in places. There are some very well thought out features, such as support for ActiveSync, categorization and an estimated shopping bill but, in its current state, I wouldn't be prepared to carry on using it.
VOShoppingList is a Pocket PC Awards 2002 Finalist and has received promising reviews on the Handango Web site. In practice, though, it has flaws that are quite readily discovered in real-life use.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for $14.95 (affiliate link). There is a 10-day trial version available. After the trial is over, you can purchase the software or install AdWare which will play a 7 second commercial before the program starts. There is a desktop version of the software that is available free to registered owners of the Pocket PC version.
Strong shopping feature set
VOShoppingList has a comprehensive list of features that looks good compared with that old piece of paper:
- Quantities for each item
- Location in the store for each item
- Whether or not you've got a coupon for the item
- How much the item might cost - this is useful for building up an estimated final bill for your groceries
- Whether or not the item is taxable; a single tax rate can be specified and is added to the estimated final bill
- Whether or not the item is a one-off purchase; such purchases are permanently removed from the list when purchased
- Categorization of each item; this can be used to filter the display of items to buy
- Easy selection of items to include in your shopping list
- Easy marking off of items as you buy them
- Synchronization of items & categories through ActiveSync
- Integration with the desktop version through ActiveSync
Figure 1: Main screen for VOShoppingList
Setting up the shopping list
The first thing that needs to be done is to add items to the list. The user interface is quite straight forward:
Figure 2: Adding an item to your shopping list
From here, you can enter your information into the appropriate categories, outlined above.
A new category can be added by clicking on the <New Category> entry. Categories in general are managed through the Category window.
Figure 3: Managing your categories
The Location window has an identical look and feel for those location names that don't fit into the supplied method of a number in the 1 - 30 range. However, only the first two characters of the location text are displayed in the main display.
Once you've built up a list of items, you can enter "Choose items" mode to decide which entries in that list you actually want to buy. Here, everything starts off as being present on your list. Clicking on an item in the list greys it out and removes it from the list:
Figure 4: Choosing items for shopping
While in this mode, you can incremently increase or decrease the quantity by clicking in the quantity column rather than having to open the whole item window – a useful shortcut.
If you've got more items on your list than will fit on a single screen, you can move through the list by clicking on the turned corner icons.
Going shopping
As you do your shopping, getting the items on the list, you mark the items off by simply clicking on the description. This puts a line through the item (as shown in figure 1).
However, because the item remains visible, the screen can become cluttered, making it hard to see what you've got left to buy. The software allows for an alternative, which is to hide the purchased items. This mode is toggled on and off by clicking on the shopping trolley icon. One frustration of this otherwise useful feature is that you can only turn it on after you've selected at least one item.
You can further manipulate the way the software displays your shopping list by filtering the category shown, from all items down to individual categories. You can also sort the location or the description by clicking on the column heading, with the current sort being bolded.
Gotchas
There are, however, some very irritating bugs in the software.
- When you add a new product, the window opens with the input focus in the Name field but the SIP isn't displayed. This means that for every item you add, you have to open the SIP, which gets quite annoying after a while.
- Another bug in the same window is in the way the software handles auto-completion. The feature is very useful, matching what you are typing against the known products and therefore reducing what you have to type, but it doesn't work properly if you are using the letter recognizer.
Supposing you wanted to enter "toothpaste". If you are using the letter recognizer, the letter T requires two strokes - a downward stroke (which is initially recognised by the Pocket PC as the letter L) and then a sideways stroke to change the letter from an L to a T. The problem with the auto-completion algorithm in this software is that it sees you enter the downward stroke, decides you have entered the letter L and immediately moves on to the next letter of the item name. It simply is not possible to enter two-stroke characters like T or I unless you use the keyboard SIP instead. - Selecting/deselecting items from the main interface is not very responsive. Sometimes, there is a definite lag between clicking on an entry and it being shown as selected or deselected. This lag can often be long enough to make you wonder if you've actually tapped the screen in the right place … which means you then try tapping again!
- There is a "Choose Items" icon (the blue tick) but while clicking on it toggles between the two modes, the icon itself doesn't show you which mode you are in. The software instead indicates this by displaying "Choose Items" at the top of the list. This is a minor glitch but goes against the way lots of other products handle this sort of feature. The shopping basket icon suffers from the same problem, which is even worse because there isn't a visual indicator of whether or not purchased items are being hidden.
- The user interface doesn't tell you how many pages your list fits onto, or where you are in the list. This is a big oversight.
There is no doubt that using a PDA to manage a shopping list can offer big advantages over more "traditional" methods such as scraps of paper. VOShoppingList goes a long way to supply and support those advantages, but it is let down by bugs and a poor user interface in places. There are some very well thought out features, such as support for ActiveSync, categorization and an estimated shopping bill but, in its current state, I wouldn't be prepared to carry on using it.
