Gift List — A Little Helper for Your Shopping
Gift giving is one of the most labor-intensive holiday chores, draining your time, energy and bank account. The principle is simple in theory: make a list of people you love and what you’ll get them. The practice, though, is hard when put to the test in life, complicated by sales, relationships and consumers’ capricious tastes, like this year’s weird resurgence of Furbies.
Our gift guides offer a plethora of options for the idea-stumped and time-starved, but you can make it even easier on yourself with a game plan, courtesy of gift lists and organizing apps that promise to bring ease, convenience and a bit of sanity to a nerve-wracking process.
What’s the App?
The “Gift List” app, offered by Gennubi for $1, is a classic app for iOS device. Released two years ago, it’s still garnering fans and good reviews because it focuses on one narrow task and does it well: organize your gift lists. Sounds simple, but what makes it powerful is how it’s able to integrate budgets and store locations into the list, creating useful ways to toggle your information depending on the situation.
Gift List lets you create and track gift lists for every person in your life, adding items, prices and stores and checking them off as needed. For the budget-minded, you can set a budget and track your spending per person or overall, keeping an eye on running totals — a useful tool when spending can easily balloon into record levels in a challenging economic climate.
The interface is clean and easy to use, and for added flair, the app comes with a number of themes to gussy up the look and feel for the holidays. Toggling between different views is incredibly useful, especially if you’re out and about at a store and need a quick list of what you can cross of your list at that particular place. Beyond shopping, it’s a useful app for birthday, graduation and other gift-giving occasions, and many reviewers attest to using the app well beyond the holidays.
For Android users, the Gift List Manager app offers similar functionality, integrating budget and location information into what is an essentially a list-making app to offer added functionality.
You’ll Want It If —
Do you head out to the mall or the stores — or settle down for a night of trawling on Amazon — and get flummoxed by all the options you’re confronted with? Are you the type to shop somewhere, head home, and then slap yourself on the forehead when you realized you forgot to buy the nephew of your second cousin once-removed a present, too? Do you tend to overspend, or perhaps even buy someone a present twice because you forgot you bought them something a week ago? Then these apps are for you.
Of course, you can use a regular list-making app to create your holiday gift game plan, listing all the people you want to buy for and ideas of what to get them. But the gift list apps mentioned here pack a number of extra features and functionality unique to the mobile handsets that make them convenient and useful when you’re on-the-go.
It’s Not My Thing, What Else Ya Got?
The aforementioned apps are classics in their niche, but they lack some more modern mobile features, such as barcode scanning or even the ability to share lists easily. (The Android app does offer it in the paid version.) For both platforms, the free iWishfor app for iOS and Android soups-up the social and scanning features. The focus of iWishfor is on gift ideas, not necessarily list organizing: you can create lists of items, with location and price information, entering notes by hand or by scanning it in with a barcode reader. You can invite friends and family to share gift ideas with you on the app, so you’ll never be short of a gift idea for them again.
The app really only gains traction, however, by sharing with friends and family, limiting it somewhat in usefulness. Still, if you’re on the hunt for gift ideas year-round, it’s not a bad way to keep track of who’s been nice — and what you’ll get to show them how much you appreciate them.