[UPDATE 2/11/2013: This app is no longer available in the App Store, apparently because Apple didn't like on-screen notifications being used this way.] Many of my favorite iPhone apps share a quality: they do one simple thing, and do it well. Dan Friedlander, an attorney in Irvine, CA, has produced many iPhone apps through his company LawOnMyPhone that aim to do just that. For example, his Court Days Pro app does a great job of calculating dates based on rules that you provide. He recently released a new app called Do Date that does one thing and does it well — it reminds you how many days are left until an event. How many days do you have before your next anniversary? Your spouse's birthday? Your next trial? Your vacation? Do Date gives you a prompt with that number every day, using Apple's Notification features in iOS 5.
Creating an event is simple. Tap the Add Date button at the bottom of the app, type in a name for the event, and then scroll the date wheels to assign a date. That's it. If you tap on the first icon at the bottom, Do Dates, you'll see a list of all of your upcoming events.
Every night at midnight, the app provides a new set of notifications with the number of days that you have until your next event. So if you have notifications on your lock screen turned on in the iPhone Settings, and assuming that you go to sleep before midnight, you'll wake up every morning with notifications on the screen of your iPhone telling you which events are upcoming and how many days you have until the events occur:
You can also view the events in the Notification Center, a pop-up window that you access by swiping down from the top of your iPhone's screen:
The app's built-in Settings let you change just a few things, such as toggling the reminder on or off again and changing the date format.
The first thought that I had when I tried out this app is that it would be useful if the app let you set the time of day that the notifications occur. If you are night owl (like me) you are often up past midnight, and it would be better to have the notifications take place at a different time, such as 5am, so they are fresh when you wake up every morning. Friendlander told me that he received that suggestion from other users as well, and he has already submitted an update to Apple that adds this feature.
In the Settings app on the iPhone, you can allow any app to provide up to 10 notifications. The default is lower than that, so if you use this app you'll probably want to increase the notification to the maximu of 10. That also serves as a limitation of the app; you can't be shown more than 10 notifications at one time. Thus, you'll want to save this app for just a few important events such as the date that a trial begins, as opposed to every pre-trial deadline. But this limitation is not a big problem because if you were to have dozens of events listed, you probably wouldn't focus on all of them anyway. Limit use of this app to your major events, and then the daily reminders of how long you have until the event occurs will have more impact.
Do Date is a focused, nicely designed app that provides a useful reminder of the number of days until an event takes place. And at only $0.99, the price is right.
Click here to get Do Date ($0.99).
