QuickAdvice: Gift Plan Lets You Beautifully Manage Gift Giving
Gift Plan ($0.99) by Glasshouse Apps is a beautiful app that makes planning out gift giving easy.
Glasshouse Apps makes some pretty gorgeous apps, including The Early Edition and Cellar, so it should be no surprise that Gift Plan is no different.
Just in time for the holidays, Gift Plan allows you to manage your gift giving needs for close family and friends.
Gift Plan first greets you with a nice welcome message, showing you the ropes of what the first steps are. The nice thing about Gift Plan is that you can import contacts from your phone's address book or even pull them from Facebook as well, given that either have birthdays listed.
On either import method, you can select your close few, or just dump them all in there if you're daring. But before you make your final choice, you can deselect them all if you think twice about having tons of people you don't see in person or haven't talked to in ages. Once you got contacts in, the Occasion screen lists off these people by order of date, and you can see a clear indication of how many days you have left until you need to give them a gift.
With Christmas coming up, there's already a Christmas list for you to start adding people to. When you have individuals being imported to the app, you can add them to various occasions as you desire. You can filter out gift days too, which include: Birthday, Facebook, Anniversary, and Christmas.
It's important to note that this may not be the best for holidays that aren't given a specific date, such as Hanukkah and the like. This is because you'll have to add people to this list one by one. Then this app may not work out for you until Glasshouse Apps implements some kind of batch add for those non-fixed-date holidays.
Gift Plan features a profile view of a person, where you can easily see vital information such as how many days/weeks are left, the person's likes/dislikes and sizes. You can also keep track of gift ideas and what you've actually gotten them in the past. All of this information is displayed over their photo in the background. It's a really nice touch and the animations are smooth and look great.
The Shopping tab lets you keep track of your gifts and information such as: Recipient, Occasion Type, Gift (what is it?), and Price. So once you get started, you can easily keep track of it with the rest of your gift planning.
Within the Calendar tab, you'll get a calendar interface that is very similar to Apple's own Calendar.app. The only difference is that any days where a gift is needed is marked by a colored line. Selecting that day will reveal to you who needs gifts that day, all color coded by the occasion type.
There's a Settings tab for you to tweak things like Notifications, Occasion Types (new ones can be added!), and Passcode lock. If you want some help with the app or learn about Glasshouse Apps, this stuff can be found in the Info tab. The Help section contains information for The Menus, Common Tasks, Tips, and even FAQs.
The only thing I found odd about the app is the bottom menubar. It scrolls, even though the five tab buttons fit perfectly fine at the bottom. I'm not sure why this is this way, but it is. Some people may be put off by this, but I find it tolerable. Whatever the reason, the animations in the app for scrolling and everything else is nice and smooth, so it's not a huge issue for me.
If you're looking for a nice, gorgeous gift managing app for your iPhone this holiday season and beyond, then definitely check out Gift Plan. For the introductory price of $1 for the holidays, it's worth it.
