Super-Shopping: My Two Favorite Grocery-List Apps

I'm a sucker for a really well-made iOS grocery app. One smart enough to arrange my shopping list in the order I pick up items at the store. And one that can live on my Apple Watch, so I don't have to juggle my phone along with my shopping cart.

Until recently, my go-to grocery app was Capitan (free). (The App Store title is “Grocery Shopping List by Capitan.”) It arranges items under standard supermarket categories--fruits, vegetables, dairy & eggs, etc.--which you can easily customize and reorder to suit your own store's layout. If you typically buy the same items week to week, Capitan offers a handy menu of previous purchases to make compiling your next list easy. As you shop with your Watch, a touch will add a strikethrough to each item on Capitan's list.

Capitan Watch menu

Capitan Watch menu

It's the perfect grocery-shopping app, except for one thing: Capitan does not integrate with Apple's Reminders app.

For me, that's a real drawback. I like being able to tell Siri to add items to my grocery list throughout the week. Those items end up in Reminders. If those Reminders items are then going to appear in Capitan, I have to add them manually. (Of course, the Reminders app itself is not yet available on the Watch.)

Then I was reminded about Grocery (free; $2.99 to remove ads). (The full App Store name is "Grocery - Smart Grocery List" by Conrad Stoll.) While it does not have Capitan's categories or pleasant color scheme, it offers several benefits Capitan lacks.

Grocery Watch menu

Grocery Watch menu

Grocery lets you pre-order your list before heading to the store. But once you're there, it pays attention to the order in which you check off items from the list. That's the order it remembers the next time you create a list that includes past purchases. (Capitan only remembers the order of your categories, not the specific items in those categories.) And Grocery allows you to have multiple stores and multiple lists saved, should you happen to shop at different locations with different layouts. (Nothing says they even have to be supermarkets.)

Best of all, Grocery integrates seamlessly with Siri, via Reminders. Add anything to a grocery list in Reminders, and it will automatically show up in the Grocery app. Select an item as purchased in Grocery (which, instead of striking through it, makes it vanish from the list) and it will be removed from Reminders.

Neither of these apps is well known or typically included on the many "best grocery apps" lists you'll see. They can even be tough to find in the App Store. But if your needs are anything like mine, they'll be worth seeking out. For me, they're the cream of the crop when it comes to grocery-shopping convenience and utility.

Old Dog, New Games: How a 50+ Year Old Discovered the Joy of Videogames

Oddly enough, my new appreciation for videogames started when I moved from a Windows computer to an iMac.  "Odd" because Macs, despite all of their other advantages, are not great gaming machines. That means relatively few games get ported to the Mac platform. So when Tomb Raider: Underworld appeared in the Mac App Store in 2012, I noticed. At that point, everything else on the iMac was new to me. Why not try a new game? 

It wasn't that I'd never played a videogame before. In the mid-70s, I had a high school friend who let me try Pong on his new Magnavox Odyssey game system. During college, I was glued to the Space Invaders machine in the campus coffee shop, a quickly dwindling roll of quarters in my pocket. After that, it was DragonFire, a cartridge game for the Tandy Color Computer, and King's Quest, a text and 16-bit graphics game for early PCs. Then I stopped. 

Fast-forward 27 years.

Joystick controllers were long gone. So was everything I knew about videogames.

I stumbled my way through Underworld, relying heavily on a printed user guide as well as the YouTube walkthroughs of a player known as Nuttylamb. (I tried a few other YouTubers, but settled on Nutty because I loved her English accent, her laugh, and her lighthearted approach to gameplay.)

I definitely needed the help. Lacking modern game experience, I was ignorant of nearly all of the tropes of third-person action-adventures. I was oblivious to highlighted handholds, overlooked the paths the game wanted me to take, discovered I'm completely incompetent when it comes to managing any sort of vehicle, and thanked Square Enix/Eidos for the gift of aim assistance.

But somehow, despite my fumbling with the fundamentals of gameplay and controller use, I fell in love with the game. I wasn't watching some flat, 16-bit rendering of a character or an environment. I was there, in exotic places that were alive. And I was experiencing it all through the eyes of the compelling character of Lara Croft, driven by a globe-spanning multilayered story.

I finished the game. As soon as the final credit rolled off the screen, I started it all over again.

I played it a third time when I picked up an XBox 360 console and said goodbye to iMac gaming. But I loved Underworld so much, I was reluctant to try anything else. So Tomb Raider remained my sole gaming addiction, with Underworld leading to the 2013 Tomb Raider, then Rise of the Tomb Raider.

After Rise, though, I was finally ready to branch out. I read XBox Magazine and Game Informer. I started following GamesRadar, IGN, GameSpot, and Polygon on the Web. I tried to understand what it was I loved about the Tomb Raider series, and then I went searching for similar games that combined action/adventure/puzzles with an entertaining story. Along the way I heard about the game that would make more of an impact on me than all the Tomb Raiders put together: Naughty Dog's The Last of Us.

Ellie and Joel, in The Last of Us

Ellie and Joel, in The Last of Us

Fans will know that The Last of Us is a PlayStation exclusive. A nephew let me borrow his PS3 to try it out. By the time I reached the opening credits -- after what must be one of the most wrenching opening sequences in game history -- I was hooked. A PS4 quickly joined the 360. Along with my own copy of The Last of Us: Remastered came the wonderful Uncharted series. My game library grew with Bioshock Infinite, Until Dawn, and more. Before I knew it, an XBox One had joined the family.

Nowadays, I try to play every weekday morning for about an hour, whenever possible. My focus is still on "story first," with quality animations and voice acting following closely behind. (While I appreciate the emotional content of games like Life Is Strange, I doubt I'll ever play it myself; the dialogue is often awkward, the lip syncing/lip animation is more like a ventriloquist dummy than an actual person, and the voice acting is just okay. But having watched several YouTube playthroughs, I do understand why so many players connected with this game. I'm just not one of them.)

I'll probably never become adept at shooting or driving a vehicle. Without aim assist, "thumb panic" means my targeting is all over the place. As for driving: I was terrible on Lara Croft's motorcycle in Underworld in 2012, and I was equally incompetent behind the wheel of Nathan Drake's four-wheel-drive rover in Uncharted 4 in 2016. It's a miracle anyone got through those games alive. 

I prefer third-person to first-person perspective. So far, Bioshock Infinite is the only FPS I've played, and it went better than I expected. Watching YouTubers play it gave me nausea. But when I'm in control, I can slow down the camera movements so they aren't so sick-inducing. Still, my sense is that Bioshock Infinite is unique among first-person shooters in terms of its world building and story. I liked what it delivered. I don't have any interest in all of the many futuristic, militaristic shooters out there. 

I want single campaigns. For whatever reason, I have zero interest in playing with other people online. Maybe it's because I don't enjoy rushing through games. My goal isn't to be the quickest or most efficient player. Sometimes, I like to just stop what I'm doing and take in everything that the developers have invested in a game. Usually it's the scenery. A hummingbird appears in the first 15 minutes or so of Bioshock Infinite; I think I walked around that guy for about five minutes. I could have watched the giraffes grazing in The Last of Us forever, if they hadn't moved on.

The Bioshock Infinite hummingbird

The Bioshock Infinite hummingbird

I play despite my weaknesses. The final battle in Bioshock Infinite took me more than four hours to win. . . and I played on the easiest difficulty! Similarly, there's a sequence late in Rise of the Tomb Raider when Lara has to shoot down trebuchet-launched projectiles in order to disable a helicopter; I cannot tell you how long I spent on that section. (For both of these cases, YouTube playthroughs were no help whatsoever. The folks I most enjoy watching got through these levels with little or no trouble. That's because there was no "secret" approach or no one solution for winning. You simply had to be good at what the game was requiring of you!)

Finally, I've enjoyed discovering that I like watching others play videogames just as much as I enjoy playing them myself. I'm particularly drawn to players who are willing to emotionally invest in the games they play, players who are open, sincere, funny. I don't want over-the-top personalities (like PewDiePie). Currently, my favorite YouTube players are Briana White, AKA Strange Rebel Gaming; GhostRobo (he's notorious for not finishing games, but he's also brilliant at rhyming commentary), TheRadBrad, TetraNinja, and, when he's not trying too hard, Markiplier. When I seek out new players to watch, I always check to see if they've played through The Last of Us. How they react to the first 20 minutes tells me whether I'll enjoy following them or not. 

My first love, Nuttylamb, has shifted from YouTube to Twitch...but her tone has changed as well. Lots of YouTubers throw around R-rated language, and that doesn't bother me. But Nutty built her brand on not swearing. So when her most recent playthrough was filled with strong language and constant sexual innuendo, it felt like I was watching a completely different player.

I will be 56 on my next birthday. And I plan on playing videogames until I can't anymore. It may seem strange that a man my age -- a man without children running around -- plays videogames. But the adults I know who have families don't have time anymore for gaming. That's too bad. Videogames give me a connection with younger generations, including my own nephews and nieces. They work parts of my brain that don't get tapped in my normal workday. And, as a full-time writer, they teach me things about story structure and plot development.

In the end, though, they're just plain fun.

Apple Watch: My First Year

You've probably heard of the Apple Watch, a device you wear on your wrist that pairs with your iPhone to provide a wide range of functions, offering utility that goes far beyond merely telling time. But odds are you've also been skeptical about how such a glorified wristwatch—or wrist-based iPhone extension, if you prefer—can possibly be worth the $299+ price Apple is asking.

Everyone has different needs and interests when it coms to technology, so my patterns and preferences may not match yours. But after using an Apple Watch every day for nearly a full year, I am 100% hooked. The Watch doesn't really handle any task I couldn't already do using my iPhone (with one exception). It just makes it easier to do those tasks throughout the day.

Email. Most email I get doesn't require a response; it's a receipt, a newsletter, a press release. Before, I had to pull out my phone everytime to see that these had arrived. Now, I get a tap on my wrist, I look down at the Watch, and then go back to whatever I was doing. Other mail just requires a simple acknowledgement; I can handle that on the Watch as well, scrolling through a list of canned responses to quickly pick the one that works. If the canned responses don't fit the situation, I can tap the Siri icon on the Watch to dictate my reply--or switch to my iPhone or iPad to type one out.

Texts and Facebook Messenger. Like email, I get a tactile tap when these come in. It's the rare instant message that I can't handle entirely on the Watch.

Siri. To access Siri, I only have to raise my wrist and say, "Hey, Siri" to set an alarm, add a Reminder, add items to my grocery list, check sports scores, etc., etc.

Weather. I'm obsessive about following the weather, so I keep a Complication running on the Watch face that gives me the temperature and alerts me to imminent rain. (Weather is just one of dozens of available Complications. Others include a world clock, alarm status, battery status, live sports scores, moon phases, and sunrise/sunset times.)

Grocery shopping. I'm the grocery shopper and cook in our family. Now, instead of juggling my iPhone—or, worse, a pen and a piece of paper!—while maneauvering a grocery cart, I use a Watch app called Capitan that manages my shopping list.

Apple Pay. I love using Apple Pay, Apple's wireless payment feature that works at thousands of credit-card terminals, including grocery and retail stores, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, vending machines, pharmacies—even the London Underground. Now, instead of pulling out my phone to pay, I just hold my Watch to the terminal, get a confirmation tap, and I'm done.

Phone calls. Yes, you can actually make and receive phone calls entirely on the Watch, as long as you don't mind everyone else hearing your speakerphone conversation. At home, this can be invaluable if you're doing the dishes or are otherwise occupied. Even in public, though, the Caller ID shows up on the Watch, giving you the option to decline the call or, if you choose, answer it on your iPhone.

Maps. Any route I've begun in Maps on the iPhone is echoed to the Watch, including a series of wrist taps that indicate whether I should turn left or right. This is particularly useful when walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood and you don't want to be staring at your phone all the time.

Voice Recording.Just Press Record is another Watch app that can be invaluable, allowing you to record anything the mic can hear at the touch of an on-screen button. (It can also be an always-available Watch-face Complication.) 

Other useful or interesting features include the Watch's ability to automatically change time zones as you travel, a variety of customizable Watch faces, its use as a remote for playing iTunes music, and (one thing an iPhone alone cannot do) its ability to be a highly accurate heart rate monitor and fitness tracker.

What You Should Know

Currently, Apple Watch must be paired with an Apple iPhone (5 or higher) for full functionality. Otherwise, it's pretty much just an expensive watch.

It comes in two sizes: 39mm and 42mm. I have somewhat small wrists, so I assumed I'd get the smaller version. However, the larger model didn't look ridiculous on me...and I appreciated the larger screen. I bought the 42mm and couldn't be happier. 

The Watch needs to be charged every night. Although it's rare for my battery to fall below 70% after a 15-hour day, I don't use some of the functions that can eat up battery life, such as the heart rate monitor/fitness tracker. 

WatchOS 2.2.1 is the current version of the operating system. WatchOS 3, with a number of significant enhancements, has been announced for fall 2016 release.

Nailing NaNoWriMo (or, Making the Most of a Writing Month)

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and it’s just one week away as I write this. If you’ve yearned to write a novel, this is the time to try. You’ll be joining with thousands of other writers across the United States who devote the month to bringing their stories to life. 

The following tips can help you wring the most from your writing time – whether you’re participating in NaNoWriMo or simply devoting a concentrated month or two to getting a story out of your head and onto the page.

Know your characters. Brainstorm specific characters’ traits and histories before you start to write. Sure, it can be fun to dive in and discover who these people are as you work your way through their story. But if you only have a limited amount of time, it pays to have the details ironed out before you begin. Besides, the better you know your characters, the less likely it is that they’ll do something “surprising” as you write. . . and cause your book to veer off on unproductive and time-swallowing tangents.

Know your basic story. It’s been said that first drafts are where we discover what our story and themes are; subsequent drafts are where those elements get developed and honed. But you can save yourself some work come December and January if you begin your novel with a rough idea of where you’re going and how you think you’ll get there.

For instance, when I began my middle-grade novel, The Timespill, I knew at the outset what my narrator’s main goal was, what the climactic chapter would include, and, ultimately, how the story would end. I didn’t know exactly how I’d wind up there – and there were unexpected (and sometimes frustrating) revelations along the way – but I knew what I was working toward.

Make a chapter-by-chapter outline. When I spent three years writing my adult novel, Lost Time, I didn’t bother outlining. I let the book develop as it went along. As a result, it took me three years to finish the thing! But when I decided to devote this past September to writing a middle-grade novel from start to finish, I knew an outline would be essential for success. I didn’t have time to mess around or get sidetracked.

Outlining the novel helped me play with the scope of the story before getting down to the writing. Given the length I was shooting for (40,000 words), I mapped out how many chapters I’d need to get there. And since I wanted a game-changing plot complication halfway through – to help drive the second part of the book – I figured out where that needed to happen.

An outline doesn’t have to be detailed or restrictive. And you can ignore it if the story dictates. But if you’ve taken the time to prepare an outline, you’ll at least have a useful roadmap for when you need it. And you’ll know what you need to do next whenever you have the time to write.

Set reasonable goals. If you’ve never attempted writing fiction before, cut yourself some slack; it’s unreasonable to expect to go from 0 to 80,000 words in a single month. Never mind that we’re not just talking about typing. Character development, plot intracacies, research – they all require time and attention.

When I devoted September to writing The Timespill, my goals were to write five days a week and to produce an 1,800-2,500-word chapter every writing day. That would get me to my goal of a 20-chapter, 40,000-word novel with two writing days left over, just in case I needed them. (Turns out, I ended up with 21 chapters, but I’d generated so much momentum that I finished four days early.)

You won’t likely have time to polish/revise much of what you write if you’re going to stick to a one-month schedule. That’s fine. The point of NaNoWriMo – or any writing month, for that matter – is to commit to daily work that helps turn your novel-writing dream into reality. Best-case scenario: After a month, you’ll have a solid first draft of a middle-grade or YA novel – or a strong foundation for building a longer adult novel.

In my case, after writing The Timespill in September, I set aside October for two stages of revisions and for getting my “final” draft into the hands of a few objective readers. By October 21, I was able to send a polished manuscript (essentially my third draft, with minor fourth-draft changes) to my agent.

Writing a novel is hard work. Doing it in one month is kind of crazy. But if you think of yourself as a writer, all of the “crazy” is definitely worth it. I can’t tell you how satisfying it feels to type “End” at the conclusion of a story you’ve been dying to tell.

Here’s hoping you find your own happy ending.