I used to work with this guy Stephen, who was a tech guy who liked to tinker around.  Before you could go into a store and buy  a digital picture frame that could play a slideshow of your JPEGs and JUH-IFs (that’s how we are supposed to spell and pronounce “GIF” now, folks!), Stephen took apart a laptop and made it into one. For what it’s worth, I think he got the idea from the tinkerer’s bible, MAKE Magazine.

I remember Stephen talking about wanting to use a personal Wiki to maintain a shopping list.  As you may or may not know, Wikipedia happens to be the biggest wiki on the web (it’s what I linked to for the article about wikis), but you can install its underlying software yourself and run your own wiki.

Stephen figured it would be nice to have an editable website that he and his wife could both maintain various things on, among them a shopping list.  Stephen could be out shopping, and his wife could add an item at the last minute which he would see while he was at the store, purchase it, etc.

I don’t know if Stephen ever got his Wiki working in a satisfactory manner, but I was happy when ShesAllWrite told me about a free smartphone app called AnyList.

It’s a simple, free app, but it does exactly what Stephen wanted.  You can maintain a list and share that list with others.  When someone updates the list, the other people accessing it will see the list dynamically updated.

You can make any kind of list you want, but they have some extra support for grocery lists.  They appear to have a database that contains a lot of common food and household items.  This is helpful because, as you type something, it auto-suggests grocery items that match your input text.

So this post, in a nutshell, is me saying, hey, this is a pretty cool free smartphone app which I think you might like.

I kid you not, I stopped a mom with two young kids at a supermarket and told her about the app.  She was carrying a PIECE OF PAPER and PEN to do her shopping!  What the hell?!!!  Yes, I probably creeped her out.  I meant well.

Note: While writing this post, I was listening to Electric Six’s album Fire.