Art of the iPhone

It’s that time of year again—the dreaded holiday shopping season. If your holiday shopping list is starting to look unmanageable, the iPhone may be of some help. Here are reviews of two iPhone apps that just might make your holiday shopping a little easier this year.

Better Christmas List

Better Christmas List ($2.99, iTunes link) is a multi-feature app that helps budget and organize your holiday shopping list. Overall, the app is well thought out if a bit cluttered in its feature set. We mainly recommend it for those who are attempting to sort out an overly complicated shopping list—it may be overkill for some.

Right off the bat, the app puts your priorities straight by telling you the number days remaining until Christmas at the top. The countdown updates automatically, so there’s no need to mess with settings or anything, although it’d be nice to be able to change the countdown date, as some families are to forced open gifts early due to travel or other reasons.

If you’re worried about someone sneaking a peek at your Christmas list, the app offers a passcode lock to keep away prying eyes.

If your shopping list is complicated, you can organize the people you’re shopping for into separate groups. The app comes with two default groups: Family and Friends, but you can add more (Coworkers, Extended Family, etc).

Individuals are added to groups by either entering their names manually or pulling contacts from the iPhone’s Address Book. This might be helpful if you’re having a hard time remembering everyone to shop for. If you have a photo assigned in the Address Book, it is pulled in along with the person’s name.

For each person, you can add gift ideas, a budget to spend, actual amount spent, notes, and whether you’ve bought, wrapped, and/or shipped the gift. As you can see, the app is quite thorough. Maybe a tad too much.

If you’re sticking to a budget, the app can keep track of all your overall spending and tell you how much more you can (or can’t) spend in your quest for the perfect Christmas. It also shows the total amount of gifts you’ve left to buy.

Conclusion

Better Christmas List is full of features, but it may be a bit too complicated to be worth the trouble. Still, you don’t have to use all of its features for it to be useful. If you’re someone who takes Christmas shopping seriously, it may be worth the download.

Better Christmas List is a $2.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Gift Assist

Gift Assist ($0.99, iTunes link) is a simple app whose focus is on helping you easily organize and remember clothing sizes for friends and family. It also can be used to create shopping lists. Overall, it’s very basic and simple in design, but we found there is little reason to use it over a good To-Do list app.

The app’s interface is very barebones, maybe to a fault (the developer won’t win any awards for design). To add a friend or family member, simply tap the plus sign in the top right corner. Then you can enter clothing sizes into 10 predefined fields:

• Top/Blouse
• Skirt
• Pants
• Shorts
• Underwear
• Bra
• Ring size
• Jeans
• Sneakers
• Heels

The downside is that there is no way to add additional fields. You’re stuck with the default 10. Where is jacket or suit size, for example?

For those who want to organize a shopping list for each person, there is a section called Wish List. You can use Wish List to record gift ideas or write additional notes to yourself about each individual. The problem is that the list is buried beneath the clothing sizes. If you’re going to be using this as an aid in shopping, you’ll probably be referring to the Wish List more than clothing sizes, but unfortunately the developer made it difficult to do so.

The app does have one impressive design touch: the ability to email the clothing sizes and wish lists in a clean, easy-to-read grid. I can see someone recording their family’s clothing measurements and wish lists then forwarding the list to other relatives.

Another feature of the app is the ability to organize people into groups, such as Family, Friends, Coworkers, etc. The app comes with a default field of Family, but you can change it and create as many groups as you like.

Conclusion

Overall, I found the app a bit ridiculous in its simplicity. It looks like a developer whipped it up in five minutes. Better to write down the clothing sizes in the iPhone’s Note app than to pay the $0.99 for this app. Not recommended.

Gift Assist is a $0.99 download from the iTunes App Store.