Admit it: You shop at garage sales. I, for one, am among the crowd that truly enjoys a good garage sale. Now comes a favorite pasttime plus my most essential device in the form of iGarageSale for iOS by Performant Design, LLC ($1.99 in the App store). This app is lightweight and easy to use, but packs powerful function. All of the information from the app is pulled from Craigslist and is constantly kept up to date. Even if you just occasionally shop garage sales on a lazy Saturday and you can afford the $1.99, I would recommend you grab this app. You’ll be glad to have it.
When you tap the app, you’ll be greeted by a brief splash screen, slightly too brief to catch all the info on it, advertising the developers and where you can reach iGarageSale on the web (iGarageSaleApp.com) and that you should follow them on Twitter and Facebook. I’m slightly dazed from trying to read the splash screen, but here we go.
iGarageSale opens on the Map view of the app, and will immediately ask to use your location. Give it to them, and your location will update the map with the garage sales near you. The presentation layer of the Browse interface has three main views: Map, Sat (satellite) and List. These are very self-explanatory. The Map view gives you a standard iOS map with red garage sale pins in the area based on your location. The Sat view is essentially the same, but with a map laid over a satellite image of the terrain – again with garage sale pins in the area. The List view shows you garage sales in the area based on your location in a descending list. This makes it very easy to find the shopping opportunity that your Saturday requires. At the top of this interface, you can change the date parameter you’re looking for.
This leaves the two other main functions of the app: your Search and Favorites functions. Within the Search page, you can search for garage sales based on a span of time and on keywords. This is very comprehensive and effective. The Favorites view is simply your Map view with your favorites only, marked with purple pins. At any point in the browsing process, you can favorite the sales that catch your eye, and you can even share them with friends via email, Facebook and Twitter. In the end, the only downside I found was that you’re unable to post your own garage sale through the app interface. Ouch. (Seemed like a simple enough idea to me.) However, this is certainly not enough of a reason to avoid grabbing iGarageSale – I mean, how often do you have a garage sale compared with how often you go to them? Exactly.
