Notificant Lands On iPhone - Synchronize Your Reminders On Mac And Web
Notificant — Notifications to Go ($2.99) by Caramel Cloud is a simple reminder app for your iPhone and Mac computer.
I have heard of Notificant since the release of the Mac App Store back in Janauary - however, I personally did not see the use of it unless there was an iPhone app. Because there was no iPhone app back then, I chose not to get it.
Today, the fine folks at Caramel Cloud released the iPhone version of Notificant, and I immediately bought it along with the companion Mac app from the App Store. And now I'm in love.
The first thing you need to do with Notificant is to set up a Caramel Cloud account. Judging from the company name, you can tell that there is heavy focus on cloud syncing with this company. And that's what you get - notifications you make from either the iOS or the Mac app will be stored and synced with Caramel Cloud's servers.
The iPhone app is both beautiful and simple. And that's exactly what you would want in a reminder app.
In Notificant for iPhone, you'll see two views - Upcoming and Archive. The Upcoming view will show you how much time is left until a notification will go off. The Archive is for old notifications, which you can then reuse for a future reminder. In both views, if an iPhone is the set device to send a reminder to, you'll see a blue corner that will let you know.
To create a new reminder, you'll simply tap the New button in the corner. You'll get a screen that will allow you to enter in some text for whatever it is that you need to be reminded of. What's nice about this that sets it apart from other apps though, is that there is a character counter. When I first saw this, I immediately thought of Twitter, since their limit is 140 characters. Notificant allows you to enter in up to 160 characters. This makes your reminders short and sweet. Just the task, and you're good to go.
A reminder can be immediate, which will be less than 60 seconds. Or you can set a specific day and time, which I would assume would be for all your notifications. Otherwise, why would you be using Notificant?
The best thing about Notificant is that you can choose which device for the notification to be sent to. Since I have both my iPhone and MacBook Pro set up with the apps, I have the choice to choose between those. If you prefer not to have popups everywhere, an option to send a notification to email (that you signed up with Caramel Cloud) is also provided.
For those that aren't aware of the Mac app, it allows simple entry of notifications and times. You can view your notifications in the web app, which is also great looking and simple. When a notification is going off, you'll get a Growl popup that will remain on the screen until you close it out. On the iPhone, you'l get the familiar pop up notification box.
Notificant is overall very elegant, simple, and fast. The only thing I would like to see in the future are recurring reminders, so that you don't have to keep manually recycling archived notifications. Also, an iPad version would be excellent.
If you haven't checked out Notificant yet, I'd highly recommend you do. It's a great way to get fast and simple reminders on your computer and iPhone. I find this to be a great tool for those small things that I need to do everyday that I wouldn't enter into my GTD or serious task management apps. Sometimes I also just need a quick little reminder. This is one app that I'm definitely putting on my home screen.
