I knew the guys at Glasshouse Apps made great apps. After all, they’re the folks behind Barista, Cellar and The Early Edition for iPad. They’ve always cared about delivering beautiful pieces of software packed with information and functionalities. But their latest adventure on the iPhone, Gift Plan?

It’s hot. It’s a gorgeous app that not only makes it easy to check on upcoming occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas) but it also serves as a nice shopping list / gift manager that helps you keep track of your friends tastes and stuff you’ve gifted them in the past. Pretty pixels are all over the place – so is a highly custom user interface – and I’m not even sure I’ll use this app regularly in the future, but I’m willing to give a try.

The most notable interface change from standard iOS elements is that you can scroll the tab bar. There’s a moving indicator above each tab and you can just tap on tabs to navigate between menus, but if you want – you can manually scroll the whole bar. I’m not sure why the developers went for such implementation instead of a single moving indicator, as there aren’t additional elements to show in the tab bar. Thus, scrolling the bar wouldn’t make sense. Still, it looks beautiful so we can (for once) leave our doubts behind. Let’s see what the app does.

First off, Gift Plan can pull birthdays from your friends on Facebook. This feature is much welcome, as I don’t want to manually enter all the birthdays I want to be reminded of and the app only requires me to log in with my Facebook credentials. After that, you can choose which contacts you want to import in the app’s Occasions. In the same tab, you’ll also be able to access Anniversaries, Birthdays (out of Facebook, the ones you entered manually) and your Christmas list. The filter menu for lists is custom, too.

Once you’ve got your people list, anyway, you can tap to open a new screen with a bigger photo of your friend, and some Windows Phone 7-like onscreen details such as “likes” and upcoming “occasions”. Animations are really nice here. You’ll also notice there’s an additional bar above the bottom tab bar which will let you  check on ideas for a gift to that friend, his or her likes, sizes and gifts you bought in the past. You can do this for any friend you “imported” into the app’s database. Again, I’m not sure how much this app will turn out to be useful in my daily usage, but there’s no doubt it’s really nice and full-featured.

You can set notifications for upcoming occasions (don’t miss that anniversary!), assign a badge to the app’s icon and even open a more native calendar interface from within Gift Plan. If you want, you can also manage your gifts from the Shopping List tab: you can enter as many gifts as you want, and check them off at any given time.

Gift Plan comes with some radical design changes and shiny, sexy pixels. The functionality’s good and the feature set complete enough to allow most average users to manage their Christmas gift list inside the app. At $0.99 in the App Store, this is the iPhone app you’ve got to have this holiday season.