Pros
Cons
Our Verdict
As long as you don’t want to do much more than make your list and check it twice, you’ll appreciate haMedia’s My Christmas List. That’s all the functionality this limited gift list management app has to offer.
Upon launching the app, you’ll see a countdown to Christmas and buttons to navigate to the Gifts or Events sections. Chances are, you’ll spend most of your time in Gifts. It’s there that you can add to your list by tapping the plus sign that takes you to a details page where you can edit several subcategories, including the name of the person you’re shopping for, the gift and its description, a price tag, and a store. You can add as many or as few details as you want. There is also a “Relation to Me” category, but I’m not sure what purpose it serves—you can’t actually sort your list by relationship.
You can sort lists by the names of the recipient or store; you can also opt to show all the gifts in a single list. My Christmas List does sport a helpful budget option for editing your total budget as well as what you plan on spending for each person. You can view how much of your budget you have spent and if you have gone over budget.
Despite its name, My Christmas List is not Christmas-specific. Or at least, it tries not be. You have the option of adding more events to an in-app calendar, seemingly so you could use the app year-round. But you can’t seem to actually do anything with these events after you create them, making the events feature superfluous.
My Christmas List lacks any kind of sharing option or the ability to sync with your iOS device’s contacts. On its App Store page, My Christmas List claims to let you add password protection to your shopping list, though I was unable to find a way to do this during my testing.
Visually, this app fails to impress, with minimal graphics that look bad on an iPhone and even worse on an iPad. Other than a few festive-looking snowflakes and a bright red border, there is nothing that screams “holidays” about the app’s appearance. It looks more like a grocery list than a Christmas list.
An ultra minimalist approach may be what some users are looking for, but why not use the built-in tools in iOS 5 if that’s the case? You certainly won’t find much beyond a bare-bones offering in My Christmas List.
[Karissa Bell is a Macworld editorial intern.]