Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed

After raving about A Cook’s Books yesterday, I have another new find to coo over: SplashShopper by SplashData.

Now that I’m getting back into the swing of tracking down recipes and creating shopping lists, I wanted to be able to have those shopping lists in my handheld in a useful way*. Years ago, I used HandyShopper and JShopper, but without a desktop companion, I found them too tedious to keep up with. I figured shopping programs must have evolved quite a lot since then, so I decided to give them another try.

After downloading a few trials, I fell in love with SplashShopper. I love the Palm interface as well as the desktop interface for Mac, and I love that it synchronizes so smoothly. I love, too, that you can set items up as being findable in multiple stores, with a separately assigned aisle and price for each store. Perfect! And of course you can do much more than grocery lists with it. I started importing all my wish lists into it last night: library stuff, CDs to buy, DVDs to buy, movies to see, home stuff to buy, etc. And I may try using it as a To Do list app, too — I’ve been pretty unimpressed with iCal’s To Do management and want something more robust.

The main drawback is the price. At $29.95, it’s pretty steep. And after spending $25 on A Cook’s Books, an even higher-priced shopping list program is not really in the budget right now. These things sometimes go on sale at the various Palm software stores, but I doubt it will come down more than a few dollars. So that’s something to think about. But I may try digging around and finding the 30 bucks somewhere in other parts of the budget. Because I am, after all, a woman obsessed. Cooking — and its counterpart, grocery shopping — are providing a needed return to sanity for me, and I may decide sanity is worth 30 bucks.

* Incidentally, if that’s a primary requirement for you, there are recipe management programs out there that do export shopping lists into HandyShopper or SplashShopper format — Connoisseur does it, and was for many other reasons the close runner-up in my software selection process — its main problem was that it didn’t scale well. I got as far as 1835 recipes and everything started to drag considerably. My entire recipe collection is probably close to 10,000 and is always growing. I was also unhappy with the multiple-tab interface for interacting with recipes.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.