Monthly Archives: May 2011

The number of calendar, note taking and to do apps available for smartphones is bewildering on every level. It seems that developers, smartphone users and everyone else is searching for the perfect way to manage the tasks we need to do each day, and it seems as though we will continue to search for a long time to come.

It is extremely difficult to balance the need to note down your tasks in a way that does not mean you spend longer organising than ‘doing’ and this is a trap I have seen many people, including myself, fall into. Calendars can get complicated and reoccurrences can start to annoy rather than remind and very soon you find yourself stuck in the trap of noting down everything you need to do using a method that is not designed to allow quick management of tasks. To do lists can also suffer from over complexity and it is all too easy to create long lists of tasks that get put back time and time again or become hidden below the bottom of the screen because the lists are too long.

I always use a calendar because I can’t get my head around To do lists. I just forget that the tasks are there and end up with lots of useless information that is of no value to me. I use a calendar because of the reminders and the ability to get an overview of what is coming up. It works well for me and the only downside is the time needed to input new entries and the fiddling around that occurs when I need to change appointments.

And then Notificant appeared. Of all the solutions I have seen to date this one seems to strike the perfect balance between keeping the user informed of what needs to be done while making the creation process as easy as possible. All you do is type a note and set the time and date to be alerted and that’s it. You can choose how you want to be alerted and on which devices and you can even choose to have an email sent to you at the appropriate time.

There is a limit of 160 characters which is slightly too low in my opinion, but I guess this makes sense to keep the simplicity at the forefront while you are using the app; it is all about speed- type in a note, set the time for the notification and choose where you want the notification to be sent to. You then get on with your life and when the alarm sounds, you do what it asks you to do and move on.

There are apps available for the iPhone and Mac and also the ability to create and manage notifications on the web. The web side works very well in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but is problematic under Internet Explorer. I asked the developer about this and here is the reply-

“Thank you for purchasing Notificant. The problems you are experiencing are there because you are using Internet Explorer, which is wildly noncompliant of web development standards.

Notificant is a sophisticated web application and has been coded in accordance with those standards and it therefore fully supports modern web browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

One day, perhaps, we will go back and make the modifications necessary to support Internet Explorer, but as it stands today, it is a fairly daunting and expensive task and we’d rather focus our resources on moving forward instead of supporting outdated browsers like Internet Explorer.

If your situation allows you, we urge you to switch to a more capable web browser like the ones mentioned above. Not only will you be able to use Notificant to its full potential, but your whole web browsing experience will become significantly richer.

If you’d like any more assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us again.”

They are of course quite right, but it would be nice to see an update because many people are stuck with using IE at work and it makes the process more convoluted. The main problem under IE, besides the presentation, is that you cannot choose a time and date when creating a new notification- you have to created it and then go back in to edit it to amend it. Not the end of the world, but it could be better.

I haven’t bought the Mac app yet because I really don’t need it. The web app works so well under Firefox that it would be an expense, albeit a small one, that would give me little more than an even cleaner interface to play with.

Over the past week Notificant has completely changed the way I managed what I need to do. I get things done, but don’t have to look at lists of tasks the way I do with a calendar. There is of course a list of future notifications, but this method of presenting them immediately puts the ‘one moment in time’ approach into the user’s head. You see the notification and you deal with it, and you don’t worry about what else you need to do until it happens. If you are struggling with organising yourself on a daily basis you really do need to take a look at Notificant.