If you’re looking to send your baby snookums photo love notes this Valentine’s Day, Valentine Photo Free (iTunes link) is a simple app that makes adding hearts and other Valentine’s Day-themed graphics to your photos easy. And best of all, it’s free.

While not the smoothest interface we’ve seen in an app, it gets the job done. Simply drag the graphics into the photos. You can resize or rotate the graphics through button controls or pinching gestures (we recommended using the buttons as the pinch gestures don’t work too well here).

When you’re done, you can save the finished product to the iPhone’s photo album, email it, upload to Twitter, or upload to Facebook, all within the app.

Again, it’s a very basic app with a lot of limitations. For instance, it doesn’t support landscape photos, so you have to choose only sections of landscape photos to use. And you can’t add your own text—you have to use the graphics provided. But the graphics are not too bad.

Valentine’s Photo Free is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

There are some iPhone apps that I just don’t get, and Christmas Tree Decorator ($0.99, iTunes link) is one of those apps. It’s a standard ‘decorate a fake tree’ app, and while I love the holiday spirit embodied in this app, and despite its popularity in the App Store, I found it kind of pointless and boring, really.

Christmas Tree Decorator has a very simple premise – decorate a blank Christmas tree with your choice of 36 ornaments, tree toppers and lights. It’s hard to classify Christmas Tree Decorator as a game because there’s really no goal. I guess you could say the “goal” of the app is to move the ornaments and lights into position on the Christmas tree so it looks nice. The ornaments include large bulbs, candy canes and spiral glass ornaments. There are also six different colors of lights.

Once you’re done decorating, you can put a background behind the tree, including a house setting or a snowy river scene. The app also includes three Christmas songs, and you can save your tree as a photo to send it to friends or use as a wallpaper. Once your Christmas tree is done, it’s displayed with a ‘days till Christmas’ countdown.

The sound effects are kind of cute – the bulbs ring and the glass ornaments tinkle, and if you drop an ornament (by dragging it outside the tree) it makes a little shattering sound. The graphics are also well done, and you can add several nice touches like twinkling lights or falling snow.

Conclusion

Overall, I don’t know what to make of Christmas Tree Decorator. I wouldn’t recommend this app for adults, it’s just too boring and after you spend two minutes making one Christmas tree you’ll probably never use it again. While I love the holidays and enjoy anything that helps me get into the Christmas spirit, this app just didn’t do it for me. When I’m using it, I can’t help thinking that the whole thing is kind of pointless. I might be a little more generous if it was free.

That said, I do see where this app could be a good pick for kids, especially with the Christmas countdown. Kids might really like decorating their own tree and saving the photo to send to their friends. So, I would recommend Christmas Tree Decorator for families who are trying to keep their tots occupied during the Christmas break. Older kids might think it’s boring, but younger kids may enjoy decorating their own tree.

Christmas Tree Decorator is a $0.99 download from the iTunes Store.

If you’re looking for the perfect music playlist for the holiday party, NuTsie’s Christmas Music app ($1.99, iTunes link) aims to satisfy with preselected playlists stocked with thousands of holiday hits. While this app is the perfect accompaniment to the holidays and can simplify that moment when it’s time to bust out some Christmas music, the price is a little steep for an app you’ll only use a few days of the year.

Christmas Music is a streaming music app (no music is stored on the iPhone, so it requires an Internet connection) that includes 16 playlists, including Top 100, Christmas Oldies, Rockin’ Christmas, Country Christmas and Classical Christmas. There’s also a playlist of children’s holiday songs.

The app streams mostly classic artists with a few modern artists thrown in via the Pop Christmas playlist, which features tunes from Jessica Simpson, Rihanna and Clay Aiken. The other playlists include artists like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and The Beach Boys. The app includes all of the standard holiday songs, and some of the most popular Christmas songs are available from multiple artists.

The app works well and I didn’t observe any noticeable glitches. Buffering times are a bit on the slow side, but not much lengthier than most streaming music apps. Sound quality is very good, even for the older songs. There’s a pause button and a link to buy the song from iTunes or watch the video on YouTube. The biggest bummer is the lack of a search function, so you’ll have to browse through each playlist if you are looking for a particular holiday song.

Conclusion

Overall, Christmas Music is a simple app that works well and provides easy access to loads of holiday music. Instead of wasting time creating an individual playlist, you can launch the app, plug it in to some speakers and forget about it. However, $1.99 seems a little expensive for an app you won’t use much during the other 11 months of the year. Many popular streaming music apps, including Pandora and Last.fm, include Christmas music. Both of these apps are free and you’ll use them throughout the year. Overall, we recommend the Christmas Music app, but only if you know you’ll use it enough to justify the cost.

Christmas Music is a $1.99 download from the iTunes store.

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.

Crazy Pumpkin ($0.99, iTunes link) is a neat little Halloween app that makes silly, scary noises as a Pumpkin face glows on the screen. You can use your finger to flick through different eyes, noses, and mouths, changing the pumpkin’s appearance and sounds.

It’s definitely an app for kids, but it’s pretty well-designed for a basic app. It’s free, so have some Halloween fun. Check out our video below for a closer look:

Name: Crazy Pumpkin
Developer: Ezone.com
Version reviewed: 1.0.1
Price: $0.99
iTunes Download: Click here