Listmas is a fun way to create holiday wish lists for yourself and loved ones. Add items to your list by scanning a UPC barcode, shooting a photograph, or searching amazon.com. Items added via search or barcode are automatically linked to their amazon.com product page. When your list is ready, share it on the web with family and friends. Add more items and re-publish your list at any time.
Listmas was born of my constant shooting photos of things my kids want for Christmas. Whenever we’re out at a store this time of year, invariably I’d hear one of my kids cry out “I WANT THAT!”. At that point I’d take a photo, make a mental note to look it up on Amazon, later add it to their Amazon wish list, then pass the list out to the family. Listmas simplifies that process into one step you can do right in the store. You can scan the product barcode and instantly link to Amazon. For more obscure things amazon doesn’t carry, you can shoot a photo and include it in the same list. When you’re done, publish the list to mylistmas.com. Then send out the link to the family, straight from the app.
Knowing that my, and potentially other people’s kids would be the focus of Listmas, I made a conscious decision to keep everything anonymous. Neither the app nor the website has a login. The app doesn’t know anything about you, except what you have entered in your list. When you publish your list to mylistmas.com, the site generates a unique url and passes it back to the app. After that, it’s up to you to hand that url to whomever you choose.
This project had a bunch of firsts for me. It was the first project that my son, James, helped me with. He’s responsible for the idea of Amazon integration, he did all of the QA testing, and he came up with the name. Listmas is my first AngularJS project using the Onsen UI framework. It’s also my first project developed, platform independent, exclusively in a browser, using the Monaca IDE. I’m going to write a separate post about Monaca because I now believe it is the best way to develop phonegap/cordova apps.
Onsen UI, built on top of AngularJS, made this project a breeze. Onsen is a very polished mobile web layout framework. It’s a small framework but it has everything you need to start a project, and finish most of them. Listmas was built entirely with stock Onsen, with just a little css to color things. Onsen allowed me to focus on functionality and get the app out to the market in a little over three weeks, just in time for holiday shopping season. Oh, and Onsen integrates Font Awesome, which is mandatory for all of my projects.
If you’re looking for a quick, easy, and free way to make your holiday wish lists this year go get Listmas now for Android and iOS. And if you’re curious, here’s my list: http://www.mylistmas.com/l/QZPgjHw5qd9OUoD:iyqW7Q