Vurgood Apps

If you’re looking for a way to make your Thanksgiving afternoon productive, then you can organize your holiday gift giving lists with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad apps. There are several high quality, reasonably priced apps in the iTunes store to prevent those frantic Christmas Eve runs, keep you on budget, and take the pressure off your short-term memory. We compiled this list to help you manage your Christmas list. Happy Shopping! Price: $1.99 The Santa’s List – Christmas Gift Organizer app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad allows you to establish a holiday budget and stick with it. You will appreciate that you are not required to follow through with registrations or establish settings to jump right into creating holiday lists. From the home screen, you are encouraged to establish your holiday budget to cover all of your gifts. You navigate the app and add gifts and recipients through the menu at the bottom of the screen. As you purchase and check off gifts on your list, your budget is decreased accordingly. A great feature is the ability to email a pdf of your gift list, so you can share the gift-buying responsibility with loved ones. The Santa’s List – Christmas Gift Organizer app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad app integrates with Facebook, but this does not enhance the functionality or experience of the app. This is a solid app for a reasonable $1.99. Price: $0.99 If you are looking for an uber-organized app for Black Friday madness, then The Christmas List app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad is a fantastic choice. The app opens with a countdown clock to keep you appropriately paranoid and on-task during the short holiday shopping season. To protect the list from the snooping eyes of your loved ones, The Christmas List app suggests you set a passcode. You have the opportunity to choose custom graphic backgrounds and gravatars for your groups, as well as upload photos of your recipients. Your groups allow you to identify business recipients, friends, and family. For each recipient, you have an extensive, well-designed list that helps you identify gifts, determine what is ordered and wrapped, distinguish between a preferred gift and a must have, as well as create a shopping list. For every gift, you add a store or choose from a thorough list of bricks & mortar stores. From the home screen, you see your lists Read More

We’ve already covered iPhone apps that will help you keep a New Year’s Resolution to get in better shape. Today we’re going to cover something a bit more personal, finding romance. Dating has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, back then putting a personal ad online was considered a bit desperate. Today online dating services, dating gurus and checking potential dates out online is par for the course. Thankfully your iPhone can keep you plugged in to what you need so you can hopefully have someone to take out by Valentine’s. Note: all links point to iTunes store. Price: $2.99 (free version also available) Rating: 4 stars It may be cliché, but keeping a central repository of the people you’ve dated along with their likes and dislikes can actually be extremely helpful. You don’t want to forget on the fifth date that the lady you’ve been wooing hates bowling and accidentally take her to the Bowl-O-Rama. Sure you could keep this information in the notes section of your iPhone’s address book, but having a private place to store your thoughts on dates is probably a good idea, and Black Book offers password protection to keep prying eyes out. For the ladies out there who might want something more feminine, the developer also offers Pink Book. Price: Free Rating: 3 stars It’s not the youngest or hippest dating network out there, but then again neither are some of us. Match.com is still one of the largest personals networks and the iPhone app does a good job of giving you access to most of the network’s features, albeit not all. There is a neat location feature that lets you search for people nearby. You can upload photos to your profile from the application as well as receive notification if someone’s winked at you or sent you a message. Price: $4.99 (free version also available) Rating: 3 stars For those who want to go a bit beyond Match.com, Dating DNA offers compatibility checking, which makes it easier to find someone who you might actually get along with. The interface is clean and simple to use, including a nice coverflow view of potential matches. You can limit your profile’s visibility to those who meet a certain compatibility profile and do location based searches for possible matches as well. Price: Free Rating: 3 stars Going out into the world of dating can sometimes be a Read More

The incredibly handy Howcast app lets you watch thousands of how-to videos. Free. Apps like Evernote, Shazam, and Mint get all the glory, but there are plenty of other productivity-boosting, life-improving apps out there. Here's a roundup of five I'm loving right now--and because I'm a cheapskate (as well as The Cheapskate), they're all freebies. Okay, your turn: What apps make your life easier? I'd prefer to hear about freebies, but don't be shy about nominating apps that cost a few bucks. Read More