KISS MY APP: Hang my mistletoe

Welcome to the first installation of a two-part Christmas special of Kiss My App. This week we look at apps for the creative, the gamers, the seemingly organised and those who just can't wait for Christmas. Also, each week we'll include a Chanukah app for the chosen ones.

Christmas Shopping List

The key to good gift-buying during the festive season is organisation and planning. You're sitting on the train reading Fishing for Fisherman and spot the perfect gift for your Uncle Rob – a new lure that looks like a tiny little squid and glows in the dark. A week later the tiny squid has completely escaped your memory and you have the sinking feeling that the perfect gift for Uncle Rob has slipped through your fingers.

Not when you have this little $1.19 app for your iPhone! You can create a Christmas gift budget and then make entries for anyone and everyone you have to buy gifts for, then enter all the gifts you want to get each person, with a budget for each. Then there are tick boxes to check as you buy each gift, so you can track your progress and see how much there is left to buy. Also, in a display of fantastic flexibility, if your gifts are for Chanukah or Kwanzaa, you can change the background accordingly. Phew.

Christmas Ringtones

I'm sorry. I've committed many sins in my life (some of which shame me deeply, but not all), but this could be the worst of them. I wish I could put a disclaimer in this column, blaming someone else for this entry or just abdicating all responsibility. But I can't.

It will offer scant relief to know that, as with any custom ringtone for your iPhone, adding it isn't easy – even with this app, which costs $1.19. You have to choose a ringtone, email it to yourself using the built-in mail app, download it onto your computer, open it in iTunes, then sync it to your phone. Not easy.

But once you've done that, you can torture people on the train, in your office, in shopping malls or even in carparks (the acoustics are fantastic) with whatever Christmas ditty you think will make skin crawl the most, make hair rise the highest, make nerves the most shot.

Christmas Rock'n'Roll

Well all love Sheep Launcher, Paper Toss: World Tour and Flight Control, but if you want to play a game on the train on your way home and you feel the need for something with a bit of Christmas cheer, try this $1.19 app.

Basically, you have to direct a little purple crazy head around a maze, by using the touch screen or tilting your phone. It's a Christmas version of the popular game Rock'n'Roll. There's a whole back story to this game, which you can tune into when you log into the game. It's very bizarre, with rhyming and story-telling, and induces more than a few giggles.

Advent Calendar

Kiss My App doesn't want to put ourselves out of a job, but this is a really cute, free little app. Unfortunately, despite much work done by the Apple team, they still haven't figured out how to enable an iPhone to eject a little chocolate as you progress through the calendar. Instead, as you open each day, it suggests one of 25 cool, free apps available through iTunes. The apps range in style, but it's a great idea and fantastic if you're on the lookout for new iPhone options. Or, say, if you write a column about iPhone apps.

Menorah – Chanukah

As all our chosen readers will know, Chanukah starts on December 12 this year. The first of our chosen apps is Menorah – Chanukah. Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, is celebrated for eight nights and on each night a new candle is lit on a nine-pronged candelabra called a Menorah. This app gives you the prayer used when you light each candle, either in English, Hebrew or transliteration and even includes audio so you can hear how it's supposed to sound and your cousins, who went to Jewish schools and speak much better Hebrew than you, don't start to snicker when you start to do the prayers. Because that can happen. Trust us.




If you have an application, for any device, that you'd like to suggest for review, please email us at kissmyapp@businessspectator.com.au