Gift Plan (Glasshouse Apps $1.99)
If you are like me, you have probably sought a way over the past several years to get alerts about birthdays and other special events such as Christmas, onto your iPhone. For a while, birthday calendar wasn’t even present in the Calendar app for iPhone, and now even with it present you don’t get any advance notice of impending birthdays. Gift Plan does a great job of solving not only that problem, but allowing you to organize every aspect of Special Occasions and Gift Giving in your life. Never again will you forget when someones birthday is approaching, never again will you forget your anniversary. Even better, now during the every day life as you think of something that may make a good gift, or hear of something that the person would or wouldn’t like, you can enter it right into Gift Plan for safe keeping.
Gift plan allows you to store the likes and dislikes of people, as well as storing the sizes of clothes and lists of ideas to purchase for gifts. You can add those ideas to your Shopping list, items can then be checked off and are then automatically added to your Bought list. The app does a great job of organizing all aspects of the occasions in a way that make it easy not only to remember, but to take action on specific events. The app is fully customizable allowing you to add custom occasions of any kind, and even has Local Notifications to alert you of upcoming events.
All in all I found the app very easy to use, it was convenient to store my information. Importing contacts was easy both from my address book and Facebook. Although if I had a contact in both locations, that resulted in duplicates which seemed a little weird to me. The app also automatically sets up all Facebook contacts as “Facebook Birthday” occasions. That was a little unusual to me as well. I liked how clean and beautiful the app looked, and how easy it was to navigate around and get the job done. For other occasions (such as Christmas) I was able to pick and choose which contacts to add to that occasion so that I can choose which people on my list I’d be buying gifts for. I also liked the fact that I could lock the app with a passcode, this is especially nice to keep someone from snooping around at gifts you have bought 
FEATURES:
- Up to 2 local notifications for each event to give you advance warning of an occasion.
- Option to display badges (or not) for events that occur TODAY.
- Easily import your contacts from Facebook or import contacts from your local Address Book (or from both).
- Add additional contacts as necessary.
- Add custom occasions with the option to have it a set date or not, or to have it a recurring event or not.
- Each occasion has a different color for easy using.
- Filter occasion view by type.
- Picture is imported along with the contact allowing you to easily see whom you are preparing for.
- Drill down on individual occasions to see more information including anything you have stored about this contact: sizes, ideas, likes, dislikes.
- Occasions are organized by how many days until that occasion occurs, starting with occasions that happened 7 days ago.
- All occasions have a number badge to indicate how many days away for easy planning.
- Occasions that are soon have a “SOON” badge across them for easy viewing. Occasions that are in the past display a “PAST” badge.
- Calendar view will allow you to see all occasions for an entire month.
- Passcode lock the app to keep snoopers out from seeing what gifts you have bought for them.
- Easily search in recipients view or in occasions view to find the correct occasion or recipient in your long list of friends.
The only thing I would change about the app if given a choice is the fact that there is no audio on the local notification, that seems to me to be fairly important, but that is just me. Aside from that, I found no other issues with this app, it functions and functions well! This issue is fixed in the latest version!
This app is made by the makers of The Early Edition, they have done a great job of making this into a beautiful, well designed app. The animations are very nice looking, the app functions smoothly and easily, every aspect of the app looks like it has been thought about up to the smallest detail. Another plus is the developer, Glasshouse Apps, they are very responsive and care very much about a great user experience. In the past I have contacted their tech support and I have always gotten quick and honest answers. They have shown to me that customer care is of the utmost importance to them.
Tired of looking for a way to organize your special events? This may just be the app for you, I know it is for me!
