Handmade review

Etsy.com is like the Amazon of hand-crafted and vintage goods. Anything from clothing to paintings to gadgetry can be found on Etsy, you just have to sift through all the entries. For Etsy users always on the go, there is Joshua Halickman’s EtsyAPI-powered app, Handmade. With it, you can keep up with all the latest listings and sort through older ones.

The first tab, Browse, has all the categories and subcategories found on the left column of Etsy’s web page. The Featured tab highlights all the listings found on Etsy’s front page, both items and sellers. Tapping on an item will bring you to a page with a detailed description, price, and quantity. When you tap on the arrow at the top right, you can open up the listing in Safari to purchase, email, or tweet about the listing. Tapping on the seller’s name will take you to their shop, where you can peruse all their other goods.

Gift Guides is rather wonderful, highly useful tab–use it well! There are plenty of categories to be found, and one that your gift recipient is sure to fit under. Other search options include the Search and Colors tabs, which use keywords and a color wheel, respectively. The Colors tab also allows you to choose a color from your device’s photo library and camera (if applicable). Focusing on a color will bring up items on Etsy that have similar hues.

Although helpful, I found Homemade (cute name, by the way) to be lacking and slightly glitchy. Don’t be surprised if it crashes on you in mid-search. There’s no Etsy account access, no seller rating/feedback statistics, no tags…and half the time, not even a correctly proportioned “larger view” photo. As a shopper who keeps a sharp eye on her wallet, I’d like to see the prices while on the listings pages; it wastes my time choosing something that perks my interests, only to find that it’s out of my price range. As it is, Handmade functions best mainly as a search tool–that Gift Guides filter is pretty awesome.

AppSafari Rating: 2.5/5

AppSafari review of Handmade was written by Julie Guan on August 26th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Art, Enterprise, Shopping, Social. Page viewed 4720 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.