Quick Pitch: Gift Plan is an iPhone app designed to solve one of life’s little problems: gift giving.
Genius Idea: Creating a holiday shopping list is one of those necessary yet tedious tasks this time of year. Jotting down notes to remember that Uncle Tim wants a new pair of shades and Cousin Sarah needs new headphones is easy enough, especially if you save them in digital form. Still, these lists aren’t exactly efficient ways.
Gift Plan, an iPhone app from Glasshouse Apps, offers up a new and convenient way to not only craft your holiday lists, but maintain an ongoing record of what all your friends and family like and want for any special occasion. The application also makes its fairly painless to build your master gift recipient list by importing selected contacts and their birthdays, anniversaries and profile photos from Facebook.
Of course, you can manually add contacts and import birthdays from your phone’s address book to complete your recipient gift list. As you do, you can stop to edit the profile for each person and add or replace a photo, specify a new occasion, jot down some gift ideas, note likes, specify sizes and list out previously purchased items. Should you make the effort, the end result will be a rich gift profile on each of your friends, which will not only make it easier to shop in the short term but will also serve as a permanent record you can reference for future occasions.
Gift Plan’s strongest quality apart from its practical utility is its colorful design. The application’s use of photos brightens the entire experience.
The slick interface is not without its quirks, but we love a number of the subtle design touches that are sprinkled thoughout the app. Occasions are sorted by date with color-coded labels highlighting the number of days until the birthday or holiday, for instance. Plus, for each idea you can tap the shopping basket or gift icons to automatically add an idea to your list or mark it and save it as bought respectively. We also quite like that you can visually navigate the image-centric gift profiles with a swipe of the finger.
One drawback to Gift Plan is you’ll have to fork over $1.99 to buy the application [iTunes link]. We’d also love to see Glasshouse Apps work in deeper integration with Facebook and pull in contacts’ “Likes.” Still, we find this iPhone application to be an almost perfect gift list builder that makes planning around holiday and birthday shopping rather enjoyable.
Occasions
Profile
Ideas
Shopping List
Calendar
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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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