App Review: CardStar
I realized I needed this app on a cold winter's evening when I went to a drive-up pharmacy window and realized that my discount card was hanging on my keychain. That meant turning the car (and the heat) off so I could send the little key fob through the drive-through's window to be scanned. "There has to be a better way," I muttered to myself as the cold seeped through the open window. (And if you are wondering where my credit-card-sized card was, it was lost long ago.)
Then my husband clued me in to CardStar, which stores all those discount cards, loyalty cards, and all the bric-a-brac you've been toting in your purse or wallet since 1999. It's the kind of stuff that comes in handy once in a while, and once you throw them away, you always find out you really needed those cards. CardStar scans the cards, which can seriously inflate a wallet, and puts them right into your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. You don't have to spend your time typing in all those little numbers. For the most part, CardStar just scans in the barcode and the card is instantly entered into the data file. It also tells you when there are specials and discounts associated with your card.
If CardStar has never heard of your card, it calls it Other, then you go back and give it a name manually.
When I just had an iPod, results were a little shaky. The scanning by camera function didn't work and I did have to enter everything by number, which became tedious and I didn't enter many cards. Then when I took it over to the pharmacy on a cold winter's day, the pharmacy scanners couldn't read CardStar off of my iPod. So I had to turn my car off anyway. Brrr. Shall we say I was happy that this is a free app? Annoyed, I asked the pharmacist if they get many of these iPod/iPhone cards and she said yes, and that only about half of them work. Hmmm.
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