The iPhone Mom

Lutin is intended for all the expecting parents out there who are trying to come up with THE perfect name for their baby. It’s an agonizing decision and I think it gets worse the more children you have. At least it did for me. At the time of my review Lutin contained 12,663 different first names. Surely there must be some inspiration in there somewhere!

An ABC button pulls up an alphabetical list of every name in the app. Luckily you don’t have to scroll through the entire list all at once, you can tap on a specific letter and then view the names that begin with it. The names will have the female or male sign next to them. Isn’t there a name for those signs? It seems like there is but that’s a bit of knowledge I’ve lost somewhere along the way. I’m not going to Google it either, that search just cries out “trouble!” The point is you can quickly glance at the list and see if a name is intended for a girl or boy or both. (At the top of the screen is a button that will let you sort out the names by gender if you like.) When you come upon an interesting name you can tap it to see it’s origin and the languages it’s found in. Some names will also have their phonetic spelling.  If you like the name then tap on the star button and add it to a favorites list. Lutin also allows you to search the app by using a search bar feature.

I do have a couple of issues with Lutin. The first is that it’s missing the meanings of the names. I know this would probably be a ton of work to put together for over 12,000 names but it seems like a key feature in an app that’s called a name dictionary.  Next, if you visit the information screen for Lutin it explains the origin of the app’s name and also has an audio recording of how the name is pronounced. There were many names in this app that I’d never heard about. I think it would be a nice feature if some of the more uncommon names featured an audio recording too. Finally, the app’s price seems very high at $5.99. Again, I know the app contains an incredible number of names  but (and I hate saying this) I don’t think I’d buy it at that price without the name definitions.   That being said I was impressed by the sheer volume of names that are available in this app. Also, it was easy to navigate whether I used the alphabetized list or the search feature.

Price when Reviewed: $5.99

Seller: Lars Begelt

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this app for review purposes.