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Review: Remind Me

January 22, 2009

Overview

Remind Me is a simple little app designed to replace the sticky notes you’ve been slapping on your forehead before you go to bed at night. When you unlock your phone, a short message of your choosing is displayed as your wallpaper. Personally, thinking about how often I check the time on my iPhone or unlock it to do something on it, the wallpaper gets a lot of visibility. Having a reminder there is a great idea. The trouble with Remind Me is the menu-diving you’ve got to do to get your message up!

Features

  • Multiple Note Types
From the familiar sticky note to the torn-out spiral bound notebook page, Remind Me gives you options for what you see when you open up your phone. I personally prefer the index cards.

  • Mix n’ Match
You can hit Custom to create the perfect combo of note graphic and your own images. Bread, milk, and eggs in front of a picture of your best friend, Fred the Potted Plant? Done. There’s also plenty of included backgrounds.

Breakdown

The Good: The good news is that this app has the potential to be truly useful. If you’re like me, and constant nagging helps you to get stuff done, this is the perfect nag - no person to get frustrated with, nobody to blame but yourself for the frequent reminders that you haven’t gotten your homework done. Even as a completely bare bones app with no pretty graphics, an easy way to put text on your wallpaper would be almost essential. The extra eye candy just makes it easier to stomach the constant reminders to call your great uncle who always drones on about his bowel movements.

The Bad: In order to put the app’s notes up as your wallpaper, you’ve got to go into your iPhone settings, open up the wallpaper option, and find the note amongst the other pictures you’ve got on your camera roll. This doesn’t exactly facilitate “on the go” note preparation. The other downside is that every note you save goes into your camera roll. If you use this app frequently, it could really clutter things up.

According to the developers of Remind Me, Apple restrictions prevent a quicker way to get notes onto the wallpaper. The inconvenience, then, is something we can do nothing about. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s inconvenient. I hope it’s feasible for some kind of workaround to be implemented. A lock screen notes app that you could update from something like twitterific would be incredible.

Verdict

Worth your money, especially if you’re forgetful. The inconvenience of mucking around in the menus is unfortunate, but ultimately it’s possible to get used to it. Remind me is useful, and fairly cheap. For me, I’ll probably stick “Update your twitter” on there and leave it - I’m trying to catch up to the bandwagon.

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