An app that I’ve used for quite a long time that I’ve never gotten around to writing about is Purchases for iPhone from Rehserve IT. It’s been a permanent fixture on my home screen for months and I think it deserves being touted for the truly great shopping list app that it is. I’ve used Shopper and Groceries in the past, but I always thought they were a bit bloated. Shopper in particular has gone from being a lightweight list app to the sad piece of bloatware that it is today. (For the record, Shopper was fine till it got bought up by a company and they crammed it full of ugly interface garbage and started putting ads into it, even though it’s a paid app.) And I have a special hate for Groceries because of its woodgrain background and default marker font. So when I stumbled across Purchases oh so many months ago, I was in love with it. The UI is mostly standard iPhone stuff, and there’s no unnecessary frills glued on like with every other shopping list app in the App Store.

Purchases has two sections: lists and items. The ingenious thing about Purchases is the way it manages items. When you’re creating lists and adding items, you can tap the star at the top to mark that item as a favorite and have it saved permanently. The app also maintains a history of items you’ve added to lists for up to one month. So what you make a new list in the future, you can tap the bookmarks icon at the bottom and get quick access to the items you’ve marked as favorite. So basic supermarket items I always buy like eggs, milk, bread, and personal lubricant are always easy to find. But let’s say I bought something recently but it’s not so common that I would add it to my favorites. I can go back through my history and see what I’ve added to lists in the past day, week, and month. If you have lots of items, pull down on the list to access a search bar. So what’s so ingenious about Purchases implementation of item management? It doesn’t keep a huge database of items. What I mean is, it doesn’t needlessly keep items you never use or haven’t used in a long time around to clutter up the app. It comes empty, and it’s up to you to create a database of items that you want. Save your favorites, and the app will give you a grace period of up to one month before it forgets the items you’ve used in your lists. It’s minimalist, and I love it.

Purchases has a few other nifty tricks up its sleeves. You can email your lists and the email that gets sent has a helpful ‘Open in Purchases’ for other owners of the app. This is in other apps as well, but Purchases also has an SMS option as well that will copy the current list, and automatically switch over to the Messages app. It can’t auto-paste the list into a message, but it might be annoying if it did. Also, I love the way it imports lists from say an email someone has sent you. For example, you get a list that looks like this:

Milk #2
Eggs
Bacon #3

Purchases will create a list containing two milks, one eggs, and three bacons.

My only two complaints about Purchases aren’t huge ones. For one, I wish the app used the iPhone’s suggestion feature when typing. If you type in ‘bacom’, it won’t auto-correct it to ‘bacon’. This is most likely to avoid constantly correcting food terms that the iPhone dictionary doesn’t know. I would love an option to toggle correction on and off. Second, when viewing items not from inside a list, but from the ‘Items’ list when you first open the app, there’s a weird open space between the iPhone’s menu bar and where the app starts displaying its list of items. It’s been there ever since the latest update to take advantage of iOS 4 features and Retina display upgrades.

Overall, Purchases is my favorite shopping list app on iPhone and between having a good GTD task manager and Purchases, I’ve deleted all other list apps from my iPhone as of late. If you like to keep lists for all your shopping, Purchases is a great solution and will only cost you $0.99 in the App Store. There’s a video tour of the user interface on the Purchases website.