Cooking with Your iPad and iPhone
- Building Grocery Lists with Wunderlist
- Online Community Recipe Apps
- Recipe Managers
- Cooking by the Book
- Protecting and Using Your Devices in the Kitchen
- Tools for the Dedicated iOS Chef
- Saving the Past for the Future
Like this article? We recommend
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Using iPads and iPhones in the kitchen may seem a little odd at first, but it's a natural progression. You might start by using the iOS Notes app to create grocery lists; then you use apps to discover and save recipes. That leads you to enhanced cookbooks and dedicated recipe apps that are designed to be readable and functional in the kitchen. To make it easier for you to cook with iOS, I've become a kitchen pioneer, testing iPad and iPhone apps and tools designed for cooking. This article describes some of the best cooking apps and tools I've found in my explorations. (All of the apps require iOS 7 or better.) Do you have other suggestions or ideas? Please contribute using the comments section.
Building Grocery Lists with Wunderlist
Dedicated grocery shopping list apps such as Grocery List Free and Grocery IQ offer specialized features like barcode scanning, support for store coupons, and list creation based on your grocery store's layout, but they really include more bells and whistles than I want. I prefer to use the free Wunderlist app. Wunderlist is a to-do list and task manager that works quite well for grocery shopping. Wunderlist apps are available for iOS, Android, and Mac OS X, and Wunderlist can sync your lists across all of those formats. You can even create multiple lists and share them with anyone who creates a free account on the Wunderlist website.
To get started, open the Wunderlist app and tap the plus sign (+) at the bottom of the main screen (see Figure 1) to create a new list, like the one I've created in Figure 2.
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Figure 1 The main screen in Wunderlist.
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Figure 2 A grocery list in Wunderlist, ready for the next item to be added.
In the "Add an item" field at the top of the app, type the next item you want to add to your list. Star any items that you buy regularly or that are especially urgent. Tap Share at the bottom of the screen to invite someone to share your list; then enter the person's email address.
When you're using your list, checking an item moves it below the main list panel, as shown in Figure 3. Uncheck items to move them back into the list. (Tap More and then Edit to delete items from the list.)
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Figure 3 Checking an item in the list moves it to a "Completed" section, where Wunderlist crosses it off.
If anyone who shares your list modifies the list, those changes are synced with the app, and you can receive updates via iOS Notifications or email. Wunderlist can help you to avoid running out of milk or cat food—and, by syncing, ensures that you don't buy an item twice.