Easy Shopping List aims at giving you just the functions you need to prepare your grocery shopping list and make using the list as convenient as possible while you are in the store. The user interface is clean and intuitive, with separate Plan and Shop modes. In the interest of keeping things simple and straightforward, ESL doesn’t include features such as product prices, quantities, photos, bar code scanning, coupons and tracking for multiple stores. For users like me who don’t need those features, apps that include them can be unnecessarily complicated to use. I also tend to avoid apps that use funky colors, backgrounds and fonts.ESL doesn’t come with a large pre-built list of products, which may initially strike some people as a negative, but I have found this to be a strength. I have gradually entered my regularly purchased grocery products over a few weeks using the descriptions that I prefer and I don’t have to deal with a bunch of generic products that I will never use. Every product you add to your shopping list is kept in a history. When you are in Plan mode, the basic way to add a product to your shopping list is to enter a few contiguous characters of the name, which will search your history and give you a list of matching products. You can tap the desired product and it goes onto your shopping list. Version 1.4 of ESL includes a feature in Plan mode to display an alphabetical list of all of the products in your history and allow you to tap any number of them to add them to your shopping list at the same time. This new feature is great to use before you go to the store to fill in products you haven’t already added using the search feature. Sometimes I just leave the app in this mode between trips to the store and tap products as I run out of them.ESL is a pleasure to use in the store. Unlike some shopping apps that make you tap on a little button icon to check off a product, you can tap anywhere on a product in your list to mark it as bought. Bought products move to a separate list so you stay focused on what is left to buy. If you tapped a product by mistake, you can quickly move it from the Bought list back to the To Buy list by tapping it. I use the ESL option to disable the screen lockout, so your screen stays on and you don’t need to keep logging in if you don’t tap a product for a couple of minutes. I also use the ESL option to disable landscape mode while shopping so I don’t have to wait for the screen to reorient every time I tilt my iPod—which is pretty often as I hold my device in one hand and pick products from the shelves with the other hand. ESL also gradually learns the order in which you buy products and displays them in that order in Shop mode. This eliminates the need for putting products into categories in Shop mode, since your list will automatically group products by store department or aisle, based on the order in which you shop. If you decide not to buy a product on your list during this trip to the store, but want to preserve its correct purchase order, ESL allows you to mark the item as Saved for Later. When you exit from Shop mode, these saved products will still be on your list in Plan mode, but their correct purchase order is preserved. It takes a few shopping trips for new products you add to start appearing in the correct purchase order, but after you have used ESL for a while, you should almost always find that the top product on your shopping list is the one you plan to buy next as you walk through the store.Even though ESL is very easy to use, I referred to the excellent documentation a few times when I first bought the app. This is available from within the app and also from iTunes via a link to the product web site. If you are curious about how ESL works before deciding whether to buy it, look at the tutorial, which walks you step by step through the process of using the app. I wish all apps in the store made it this easy to evaluate them. I have also contacted Hacknicity Support a couple of times with questions and ideas and Geoff has been very responsive.