By Calvin O. Parker
When the PalmPilot first came out, there weren't a lot of applications available for it. Because of this, it was fairly common to see people submit "wish lists" of applications they'd like to see written for the PalmPilot. While these wish lists often contained some outrageous requests, most also included practical PalmPilot solutions, such as databases, spreadsheets, and requests to extend the capabilities of the built-in applications. Inevitably, some of the requests for applications were met with others saying something to the effect of "But wait, you can do that already, and here's how..."
One of the applications that kept getting mentioned, but didn't really have a dedicated solution (at the time) was a general purpose shopping list application. I know what you're thinking, "But wait, you can do that ..."
Actually, in this case you can use the built-in applications, but not really in a way that lends itself to the job at hand. In this article, I'll first take a look at how you might go about using the built-in applications to keep track of shopping list items. Then proceed on to cover some of the applications that can be used to accomplish the task at hand. Finally, I'll briefly go over two applications that were specifically written to address shopping with your PalmPilot.
Built in solution
The most obvious of the built-in applications to use for a shopping list is the To Do List. Enter the list of items that you need into a special category called "Shopping List" in the To Do List application, and check them off as you buy them. This solution certainly works, but doing this will require that you enter your list of items before each trip.
If you're like most folks, the items you buy at the store can be placed into several categories:
- Items you buy regularly, such as milk, eggs, and bread.
- Items you buy not so regularly, or perhaps only if they are on sale
- Items you will buy once, and then won't need to buy again (or not for the foreseeable future).
Using the built-in To Do List application
A possible solution would be to simply uncheck all the items in that category after you're done shopping. This would leave your item list intact, and ready to check off next time you went to the store. For this method, I'd recommend using two different categories: one for items needed (i.e., Shopping List), and one to keep a complete list of possible items that you might need to buy (i.e., Groceries). Building your shopping list would be a simple matter of displaying the categories, and changing the needed item's category from Groceries to Shopping List. Again, this method (or a variation of it) would work, but depending on how many items we're talking about, the after-purchase "unchecking" step could be time consuming.
