Keep Track Of Annual Events With Yearly
Yearly ($0.99) by noidentity gmbh is an app that will help you remember those yearly events, such as birthdays and anniversaries.
The thing about Yearly that drew me in immediately was the interface. Noidentity is the developer behind other beautiful apps (MoneyBook, ListBook, and BudgetBook), so it’s no surprise that they created another stunningly gorgeous interface. The visuals in Yearly are just pixel perfect, and I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.
Yearly serves to help you remember when those annual events are. You would think that this would require use of the default Calendar on your iPhone, but Yearly actually uses the data from your iPhone’s address book instead. That’s right – any date that is associated with a contact in your address book will be put in to Yearly.
On the main screen, events will be listed in chronological order. You will see the person’s photo (if applicable), their name, type of event, date, and how many days away it is. Swiping on an entry will allow bring up three options: SMS, email, and call. This is convenient if someone’s birthday is coming up and you want to send them a quick message, and the like.
A person can be selected by just tapping on the entry, and this will take you to the Detail screen. In the Detail view, you will be able to see: name, photo, how old they will be or how long you’ve been together (for those special anniversaries), zodiac sign (for birthdays), event type, and all contact information. There is also an additional Notes field that you can enter any important information (think sizes of clothes, hobbies, etc).
Yearly also supports push notifications, which you can set for up to 14 days in advance (plenty of time to get a gift) with a specific time of the day to be reminded at. Unfortunately, this notification will be applied to everyone, you can’t just select a few select people to get notifications for. Perhaps this can be changed in a future update.
The Gestures option under settings allows you to customize the numbers and addresses that you want to prioritize for the shortcut feature. You can choose between mobile, home, private, and work. Additionally, you can swipe left to right anywhere from within the app to go back to the previous screen, which is pretty handy.
Yearly is a simple and minimal app that does what it advertises: reminds you of annual events. However, there are some improvements that could be made to make the app even better.
The biggest drawback is that the app only pulls data from the address book. I think for an app such as this one, pulling data from the Calendar would also be useful. I’m not sure how many people would keep information such as birthdays in their contacts, unless they do something like Facebook sync, like I have. Perhaps having the ability to fetch data from the calendar could be an option in the future.
Another thing is the inability to create a new annual event from within the app. You are currently limited to the information in your address book. I would have liked to create new events or delete duplicates in Yearly.
Notifications also need to be more customizable – I only want to receive a notification for a select few. There should be a toggle among each listed contact for receiving a notification. This “all-or-nothing” approach for notifications can be quite overwhelming if you have a lot of contacts.
This is still just a 1.0 release, so hopefully there will be a lot of updates in the future (that will fix some of these issues, I hope).
If you want an app to help you remember those birthdays and other special days, then the $0.99 for this app will be well spent (assuming you keep track of all that stuff in the address book of your iPhone). The interface is delicious, which is just a bonus.
