m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Market Bucket is a web app for grocery (and other) lists, running on the social networking platform app.net. With it you can create simple or complicated lists, with or without archiving of completed items (for reuse of those items when you need more eggs, because you always need more eggs). I always need more lists, so it also lets you create as many lists as you want, of whichever degree of complexity you want. To use Market Bucket, you’ll need a (free) app.net account, which should be offered to you when you click on the Authorize with App.net button.

Peter and I have been using my betas of Market Bucket for our grocery list for a few weeks now. I wrote it because we were frustrated with other shopping lists apps. We needed a shared grocery list that could sort items by both grocery store and urgency/completion. (In Market Bucket we do the former with tags and the latter with multiple lists with archiving.) I’m not saying that no grocery list app out there could have done what we wanted, but there were so many—most of which didn’t obviously support our needs or had other downsides like iPhone bugginess or price—that it was easier to write my own than go on searching.

I started working on Market Bucket at the beginning of September. In October there was a major refactoring because I was frustrated with the spaghetti code I’d written so far. (Now the spaghetti is at least contained within modules.) For the ADNFuture Hackathon this past weekend, I decided to get Market Bucket version 1.0.0 ready for release. (The biggest issue was that my list creation code no longer worked after other code changes. I’d manually updated our personal shopping list along the way so we were unaffected.) This is that release.