Reminder Pro – Released!!
I am proud to announce the availability of ‘Reminder Pro – Birthdays, Anniversaries’ to the App Store.
Reminder Pro
Reminder Pro has been in development for nearly 6 months and is the most comprehensive Birthday, Anniversary and Event Reminder application available for the iPhone / iPod Touch.
Reminder Pro is the ultimate Birthday, Anniversary and Event reminder application available.
It includes all of the following great features:
* Beautiful interface with great graphics
* Works with your existing Contacts
* Shows Birthdays and Anniveraries
* Edit and Create Contacts directly
* Assign photos from camera or album
* Create custom events for holidays, important dates, etc
* Assign icons to custom events
* Send Emails, Text Messages
* Call Contacts directly from Reminder Pro
* Sort by events by Name or Date
* Filter to show only the events you need
Reminder Pro will even place a small badge on the launch icon showing the number of upcoming events so you dont miss important dates. You can change the period that the icon badging looks ahead from 1 day to 3 months.
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- Reminder Pro
Don’t miss out. Get the most feature rich Reminder application today.
Question:
Will you be adding “Push” e-mail reminder to the app?
I’m thinking of buying it but I don’t want something I have to keep on the first page of my
iPhone to see to use (small badge).
I must say, from the screenshots your app looks great.
Hi Daniel
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to answer this common question.
We intentionally do not support push notifications, because in the current format Apple have made this service available it does not support this type of application. The Push Notification Service is designed for IM type applications, and assumes all apps which want to push will already be client/server apps.
Reminder Pro only has local data and wants to make notices on the local device (like Calendar). Under the current model, we would have to bring up an Internet server, sync ALL of the contact data from every users device then run a job on that server that monitors the synced data and sends push notices to Apple, who then send them onto the devices. All of this is required to get an iPhone application to generate a local alert about a piece of data it ALREADY HAS in local storage. Not only is this clearly ridiculous, not only does this force the developer to carry much more overhead – it also adds more potential points of failure and would compromise the privacy of your contact data.
For this reason and many others I believe Apple will shortly release a local Push server on the device that reads a list of local posted notifications (like cron jobs) and channels them locally on the device.
I recently bought your app “Reminder Pro”. From what I have used so far, I like it. Very easy to read and enter information. The only problem I have is when I opened the app and it loaded all my contact info, I somehow have duplicate contacts in my list. I was wondering – How do I delete one of them? (By the way, I did check my address book, I only have one contact listed for each person). Your help is greatly appreciated. Keep up the great work.
Hi Becky
If you have both an anniversary and a birthday set on the contact, then they will appear twice in the ‘All Events’ view, once for the Birthday with a birthday icon and once for the Anniversary with an anniversary icon. This is by design and it is because you are looking at a list of events, not a list of contacts. It reads the contacts on every launch and doesn’t store anything else about them in the app, so there would be no reason for duplicates apart from the above explanation, or if you actually have duplicates which you can check by running the Contacts application.
Looks good. Does this automatically pull-in the Birthday field from the Contacts? And if I have other Date fields added to a Contact, can I use those?
And is there a way to import a set of holidays into here? Would be good to have reminders of upcoming ‘standard’ events. Ex: don’t forget Father’s Day (US) is coming next week…
@John
Hi John
Yes, it does automatically pull in Birthdays from the iPhone Contacts application. It will also pull in Anniversaries you have defined there too.
It doesn’t pull in other date events, because it has its own independent Custom Dates database for none contact related events. You can use this feature to enter all the holidays that you want in the application. It can’t import these from the Calendar because Apple provides no programatic access to the Calendar database. You can also specify icons for the holidays.
I’ve purchased your app and very good so far. I was wondering if it is possible to add birthdays without having to add contacts. i.e. I want a birthday reminder of my nephew/niece who is only 2 years old – doubt if they have mobile phones etc… so I really don’t need to add them as contacts
I could add them as standalone events but then it doesn’t report the age… could we add this as a feature for next update?
Thanks
@steddyman
I have the same problem with duplicated birthdays,
There are no duplicates in the address book, but i do have groups.
It seems to be importing them both as separate events.
Now i see my new Bento app also with duplicated birthdays & my address book is not picking up duplicates when checked. The dupes are inconsistent in both apps, not all are duplicated & some different events are duplicated, anniversaries are the same problem. This app may not be the problem.
@Gareth
Hi Gareth
In theory it is possible, but I think this would be very confusing to users. When you went to add an event, you could chose Birthday, Anniversary, Standalone or Standalone Birthday. Users already find it a little confusing it uses contact data.
I could add an option to Standalone Events to show the age if you like and maybe an icon to represent a person. Would that suffice?
@Dave
Hi Dave
Sounds like you may be syncing to two different sources such as Desktop and Google, causing you duplicates. I know Google sync can change the unique ID of the contact on each sync which will break most apps.
Are you also sure it isn’t simply that one contact is a Birthday event and the other is an Anniversary event? As stated above Reminder Pro is showing a list of events, not contacts so if a contact has two dates it will show twice.
@steddyman
Hi,
Yep something like that might work as there are many birthdays that I wish to keep track of but I do not want to add all these as contacts. Just need to add something generic as it may not always be a birthday in the “Standalone Events”. I might also want to keep track of how long I’ve known someone (other than a Wedding Anniversary) and also have that “Age” or “Anniversary” displayed as well.
So we need some sort of time elapse from the original date entered in the “Standalone Events” similar to “Birthdays” and “Anniversaries”.
Thanks
@Gareth
Ok
I’m having to resubmit the app this week anyway to change the icon, so i’ll add that feature in ready for that update.
@steddyman
Thanks steddyman,
Just reviewing the app again it would be best to do the following:
1) Select Birthdays
2) Select “+” to add a new birthday
3) When the list appears have another option such as “Standalone Birthday” and remove “Standalone Event”. “Existing Contact”/”New Contact” is perfect but “Standalone Event” is confusing. As a user I just want to add a birthday to the list without having to add a contact.
4) When I select “Birthdays” it should display all birthdays i.e. birthdays from contact list and standalone birthdays otherwise the user has to switch between “Birthdays” and “Standalone Events” to see all birthdays. Having to switch between the two is a bit confusing
“Standalone Events” should be left to items such as “School Reunions” etc…. and then have a time elapsed on these items so it can be known whether its the 5th/10th reunion etc.. (to be in next update
– THANKS!!!)
If you can consider the above item regarding birthdays for a future update that would be great…
Thanks
I uninstalled, reinstalled & removed bento. No Luck, still duplicates, not anniversary, they do their own duplication. Is Mobile me causing this, I must not be the only one, you should figure this out.
I am researching the few not duplicated. Also when new event entered, it put it in bento not my mac address book. So there is some issues, not sure what they are.
It is the mobile me.
For those with duplicated events:
Go to Settings- Mail, Contacts, Calendars,
Then .Mac/mail,calendars=MobileMe
Slide Contacts Off.
Not sure if this affects other apps for other reasons.
FYI
No matter how fast the modern world turns,
Humans still have to eat, sleep & go potty
We can not compete with an enter key or remote control.
Good Luck
Hello,
Can this application run in the background and remind me of calls I have to make?
I used to have a Nokia mobile and I could set an event whenever I wanted to call someone. At the desired time the mobile gave an alert and displayed number to be called, and with a single button I made the call. Is this possible?
Ho Costa
No, this isn’t possible. The iPhone operating system does not support background applications that are not part of the operating system itself.
Hello, i bought this app few days ago and it works quite well…
However there is a big problem for me which is the app can’t update the badge until i launch it!
Which means if i dont launch the app during a week i can miss several birthday during this period.
I put the looking ahead option on 3 days because i dont want to remember a bday everyday during a week or worse a month…
Is there a way to change this?
qst: Can i add a custom date that i can create in the contact of iphone at’events’ in the reminder such as car insurance renewal date? it is important to me because i need to trace the renewal date. thank you
@Mazus
Hi Mazus
This is a limitation of the iPhone SDK. Applications cannot run in the background. The only way around this is using notifications and the Internet. There are inherent limitations in this approach, which I explain above in reply #2.
@NG
Hi NG
Not sure I understand your question fully. You can add standalone events, for things like your car insurance reminder. These are not stored in your contacts database though, because it cannot hold data unrelated to contacts. Instead Reminder Pro stores this in its own database.
@steddyman
Well, sorry you had partially answered the question.. I hope Apple will fix this soon.
Thank you.
hi
this in regards to ur conflict with apple on “push”
u have stated “push will already be client/server apps.”
i dont agree with ur explanation as how come calender events are notified on the standby screen and not urs (on any way but by tapping the icon and refreshing it everyday).
there has to be some way i can get a notification without “reminding myself to tap reminderpro!!!!!”
and the present limitation should be made available to users BEFORE they pay u
NOW u owe us
please rectify
regards
onil gandhi
Hello Onil
The Calendar events are notified on the standby screen because it is an internal Apple application and Apple do not have any restrictions on running processes in the background.
The developer API that provides all developers access to write software on the device does not provide background process activity. That is reserved for Apple software pre-installed on the device, like Mail and Calendar.
As stated at the top their is a workaround for developers that can be used by setting up a Push Notification service on the Internet and uploading all of your personal contact information to a shared server.
I have no reason to lie to you Onil. Please do a search on iPhone background applications and you will see it is a common complaint from developers.
Steve
u say you didnt lie and i agree. thats not the issue, but is the limitation mentioned anywhere so that a buyer can make a informed decision?
@steddyman
either way the story for us users remains a sad one be it windows (frequent breakdowns virus etc) or linux (keep searching for drivers) or apple (issues stated above and maybe many more)
when will a simple complete package/ os be made available
@Onil
I just got this program, upgraded to Pro and really like it!
Would you add an icon (such as a cross) for a standalone reminder that I would set to remember the passing of loved ones? I don’t see any presently that would be appropriate.
Thanks so much…
Good spot. I thought I had all the icons covered, but you are right that does seem to be missing. I’ll add it in a future update.