Help Is At Hand For Gift Search
The lights are being switched on, the market stalls open this weekend and the shelves are full of mince pies.
Christmas is coming, with just four weeks left to be ready for stocking filling.
Help is at hand, though, from an dizzying array of Apps.
The opportunities for dispensing with paper present lists appear endless.
Type ‘gift planner’ into your App store search facility and there is a long selection of tolls for planning what items to wrap up for others and tracking a gift budget.
Key in ‘wishlist’ and you will find a bewildering choice of options for creating, storing and sharing your personal list of present ideas for others to choose from.
Some of these Apps appear in both lists. There are even some for groups of friends or whole families to share and manage their many present suggestions.
Take the popular Giftster, for example.
Here, a family or bunch of mates can each create their own wishlist by typing a few details of desired items or ‘fetching’ them in from websites which are selling them.
Others in the group can then mark items as reserved, or even purchased, but without each list owner seeing which of their own items have been checked off.
Giftster also has a facility for running a ‘Secret Santa'.
As ever, each App has its relative strengths and weaknesses.
Giftster gets criticised for not having the means to capture extra items by scanning barcodes in shops, which can be done with Giftry, Monkey Wish and Wish Explorer.
Where Giftster can import photos from the web, others like Giftbuster, Giftler and Monkey Wish can import them from the phone itself.
