QuikShop

So I went to the MIT App Inventor site (https://appinventor.mit.edu/ ), and built this app - excellent site, by the way, if you yearn to build your own app, the environment is capable of doing some pretty cool stuff.

The app isn't designed to cater for the long shopping lists associated with becoming a survialist - it has a ten item capacity for no better reason than that was all that would fit on the screen of my phone. But it works for me as my average quick shop typically consists of perhaps six or seven things, and if really pressed I suppose I could put more than one thing on a line.

The app is also designed to be dirt simple to use - it has just five things it can do:

• You can click into a text box and start typing

• You can click the "Rec/Clear" button next to the text box and Google will translate (more or less) what you say into text and then load it to the text box

• You can click the little square (check box) next to the text box and the item will turn to a grey background to reflect you've picked up that item

• You can press and hold the "Clear All Entries" button, which resets everything back to empty.

• You can press and hold the "Rec/Clear" button next to the text box and the check box and text box will reset without triggering a recording session

While it can remember whatever is on the list between uses (handy if your wife keeps thinking of things to add to the list as you are going out of the door), it doesn't do tricky stuff like remember favourite items, or tell you where to go in the shop, or launch rockets - those are all ideas for a future version, if I can be bothered to get around to it.

The app is free to use because I'm too lazy to figure out how to charge for it, even if someone was prepared to pay for it - I'm just putting this up for a bit of fun and so I can tick that box next to "Contribution made to humanity" on my bucket list. Knowing my luck, the app will go viral and I'll miss out on buying that house in Majorca as a result, but them's the breaks.

A word on the security of this app - it doesn't have any as I didn't feel it was necessary to password protect my shopping lists. That said, the data is stored locally on your device, and, I'm told, is local to the app and nothing else on your device can access it. Don't hold me to that though, I'm not a hacker but I'm told some are pretty clever. The Google Text-to-Speech function attached to the record function does take what you say and offloads it to Goggle to do the magic, but as far as I know it only listens for the short period while you are speaking. If you are really paranoid you can just type in what you need to get. I'm not that paranoid, and I'm lazy, so that is how the function got included. That and I think it is pretty cool, even if a bit random at interpreting my speech.

Finally, app support - don't count on it. I know the app works on my ancient Nexus 5, but given that's my only Android device I can't be sure it works on everything else. That said, I've tried to use the most generic of user interfaces and controls, so with luck you'll be OK. If not, well, you get what you pay for. If you're interested enough, let me know what the problem is, I'd be interested to see how well the app survives in other contexts, even if there is probably nothing I can do about it. As a last resort for you (and really, you should probably just give up and find a different app), I've published the source code on the MIT App Inventor app gallery, or you can email me directly at quickshopapp@gmail.com, but be warned: I'm terrible at reading emails...