In addition, the company announced that iGarageSale Lite, previously a paid app, is now available for free. Aaron Kardell, founder of Performant Design, said “we are pleased to make iGarageSale Lite a free download so that more people can use our apps to find garage sales in this busy season.”

iGarageSale has been featured twice by Apple in iTunes in the New and Noteworthy section and in the Best New Home apps featured category. iGarageSale was also nominated in two categories in the 2009 Best App Ever awards.

iGarageSale pinpoints garage sales on a Google Maps interface and provides directions to each sale. iGarageSale provides browse, search, and favorites modes to scan near-by sales, search for specific items, and mark the favorite sales found for quick recollection. Favorites can be shared with others by e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

iGarageSale Lite is a free download on the App Store and iGarageSale Pro is currently available for $1.99.

There are only ten nominees per category in the Best App Ever Awards which are presented by 148apps.com.

We want to say a sincere “Thank you!” to all who voted to nominate.

Voting is now open until January 31st for all nominees. We’d be honored if you’d take a moment to vote in both categories below:

Vote for
iGarageSale
in
Best Use of Location Services

Vote for
iGarageSale
in
Best Outdoor Use App

Thanks and Happy New Year!

The Best App Ever awards is soliciting nominations across 55 categories. We ask that you nominate iGarageSale in the Best Use of Location Services and Best Outdoor Use App categories. Doing so only takes a couple of clicks.

Nominate
iGarageSale
for
Best Use of Location Services

Nominate
iGarageSale
for
Best Outdoor Use App

Thanks to Dan Grigsby and Mobile Orchard for the informative post on Fighting Back Against The App Store’s Negative Rating Bias. The following serves as proof both that the technique discussed on the Mobile Orchard site works, and that people consistently agree that iGarageSale saves time, makes great use of the device’s GPS and maps capabilities, and serves as a great outdoor activity and excuse to get out of the house.

Read more about The Best App Ever awards here and here.

Read more about what happened behind the scenes on the Performant Design blog: Tell iPhone Devs – Pick Up the Phone!

iGarageSale shows all of the garage sales and yard sales that are taking place near you on a map. When you find a sale you like, you can get directions directly to it.

iGarageSale Pro provides additional functionality not found in iGarageSale Lite: 1) Save time by searching sales for specific items, 2) Mark your favorite sales to quickly return to them later, and 3) Share your favorite sales (including a map) by e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

For a limited time, iGarageSale Lite is $.99 FREE, and iGarageSale Pro is only $2.99 $1.99.

To do so, we are asking for your help. In your country, do you typically have “garage sales”, or do you have something different like “car boot sales” (common in the UK)? Where is the best place online to find “garage sale” classifieds?

If you can point us in the right direction on the above questions, please either Contact Us or reply to this post. Thanks in advance for your help!

In addition, our product description ends with the following information in the rating section:

The long answer is a bit more detailed…

When we originally submitted iGarageSale to Apple, we used a questionnaire provided by Apple to determine the rating. We came up with a 12+ rating, citing Infrequent Mature/Suggestive Themes and Infrequent Profanity/Crude Humor. Understand, though, that we were doing this to err on the safe side. We have yet to see a garage sale listing with profanity, crude humor, or mature/suggestive themes. However, it could happen and likely will at some point, so we thought a rating of Infrequent Profanity, etc. / 12+ would be safe.

Nine days after submitting our first copy of the app to Apple, we received a rejection notice by e-mail. The rejection notice stated: “iGarageSale 1.0 allows unfiltered access to Craigslist, which include frequent mature or suggestive themes. Applications must be rated accordingly for the highest level of content that the user is able to access. Please see the attached screenshot.” Here is the attached screenshot (if you’re concerned, it’s completely safe for work):

Fortunately, 8 days after resubmitting the same app with the 17+ rating, we got an approval notice from Apple. 17 days felt like an eternity to wait, but in the end, at least the app was accepted.

There is still concern, though, that the 17+ rating misleads potential customers on the nature of our app. On the one hand, Apple accurately determined that it is possible to get to a search box for all of craigslist within the iGarageSale app. However, the primary purpose of the app is to browse and search garage sales, and it takes a considerably more effort to get to a search box for all of craigslist, than it would to simply open up Safari and browse to craigslist.org.

Here is a quick visualization of how many steps it takes to get to a search box for craigslist:

You have to open a garage sale listing, do a lot of scrolling, and finally click in the site path / “cookie trail” to open up the broader craigslist site. From there, you could conceivably look or search for anything on craigslist.

Curiously enough, there are a few craigslist apps in the App Store that have a 4+ rating (Thirsty Pocket: Craigslist) or a 12+ rating (CraigsMobileList, Craigs Ads – The CraigsList). Other popular apps provide search access to user-generated content sites, and also have a 4+ rating. For example, Quik Search Lite (search Urban Dictionary, craigslist, etc.) and Tweetie (infamously rejected for showing a swear word from a trending topic on Twitter).

In the meantime, we would like to hear from existing and prospective customers. For future releases of iGarageSale, would you like us to add more filtering and restrict the links that can be clicked within the app in order to try and obtain a 12+ or even a 4+ rating for our app? Or, would you prefer we leave the app as is?

UPDATE: The latest edition of iGarageSale only has the “Frequent Mature/Suggestive Themes” label. Still looking for feedback, though… Should we limit the apps capabilities, add filtering, and remove the 17+ label? Or, keep things as-is?