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You usually have a general idea of what you’ll work on during the day, that’s why GTD apps work: you schedule ahead of time what you want to get done through your day, so that you don’t forget about it. But what about the tasks that come up during the day? You know, suddenly you remember that you told someone you’d give him a call, or that you haven’t washed the car in weeks.

That’s what the app that we are reviewing today, Alarms, is useful for. It’s a simple app that lets you create quick and simple reminders without interrupting what you are doing.

Interested? Read on to find out more.

Getting Started

Alarms is as simple and pretty as apps can get. It will run in your menu bar, showing up by way of a little bell icon. If an alarm goes off, the bell will continuously vibrate and make a sound until you snooze the task or get around to doing it.

Once you complete something, you’ll have to notify Alarms by going into the app and checking the task. If you click the little bell, a timeline will drop down where you can schedule new tasks and interact with the ones that you already have. You can also drag pretty much anything to the bell and make it into a task.

That’s pretty much Alarms in a nutshell, but let’s take a slightly deeper look…

The Interface

As I mentioned, Alarms is very pretty and it goes along with your Mac well. If you click the Menu Bar icon, Alarms will bring up a timeline divided into three parts.

The first one is a box that has all the things that are due now. There you can check tasks as done or view them (if your task is a link, for example, it will bring up the page). You can also drag the tasks that are due to re-arrange them for a later time.

In the second part, there’s the timeline itself. Here you’ll see a bar broken down into hours. This is where all the other tasks that are due later in the day live. The third part is a small calendar that is positioned to the right part of the timeline, and with it you can jump between days so that you can schedule tasks ahead of time.

Adding New Reminders

Adding new reminders or tasks is, like anything in this app, very simple. You can jump into the timeline and double click on any hour and create a task there. Once your task is created, if you want it to be at a more specific time (say, 2:15 instead of 2:00), you can slowly drag the task to the time that you want it to be in. I’d much prefer to just type in the time that you want the task to be in, but there doesn’t seem to be any option to do that.

Another option to create a new task is simply to drag something into the app. I tried this with folders, files and links and all of those seemed to work. You just need to drag something into the bell icon, and the timeline will open. Then you’ll be able to drop what you are dragging to a particular point in time.

Managing Tasks

Once an alarm goes off, you’ll be notified by an alarm sound, a Growl notification (if you’ve selected this as an option), and the little bell icon will begin to “vibrate”. You can then go into the app and view the task, mark it as done or move it to another time.

The sound will continue to play every minute or so, and the little bell won’t stop vibrating until you complete the task, so if you want to avoid all this annoyance, you can snooze the task by quickly moving your cursor to the left and right 4 times.

Once snoozed, the alarm will stop bothering you for some time, but it will come back to remind you again a little later.

Other Features and Settings

Alarms also has a few additional features. If you click the bell and drag it down, a timer will activate, which you can control by moving your cursor further down or up. The timer notifications work very much like the reminders, and it’s a handy way to quickly set a timer. Maybe you’ve started boiling an egg, and want to be reminded to take it out after a few minutes…

You can also transfer your tasks from iCal, and birthdays from Address Book to quickly create reminders related to particular calendars or events. Under the applications preferences, you’ll find lots of options. You can change sounds, set shortcuts for the snooze feature, and even stop the alarm sound from repeating after it sounds the first time.

Conclusion

Alarms can make a great little companion to your GTD software of choice. Even though it doesn’t have a “History” feature and lacks some features, the sleek simplicity makes up for that. It might not replace your current GTD app, but I don’t think it’s really trying to.

Think of Alarms as a reminder app that gets you through the day, used for quickly setting up tasks that you have to get done by a certain time. Handy, reasonably priced, and worth looking into if you regularly get interrupted with tasks and to do’s during the day!

Although many people have differing opinions on the recently launched Mac App Store, there’s one thing that’s almost unanimously agreed upon – it’s great news for developers.

Many critics cite the restrictions and limitations as being a terrible thing for developers everywhere, but I’ve heard very few complaints from current Mac developers. Everyone seems thrilled with how things have gone so far.

In today’s post, I want to spend a few minutes showcasing how being featured in the Mac App Store has positively impacted developers and their software. We’ve also asked a few developers what the associated increase in support requests has been, and whether they’d consider going Mac App Store exclusive. Some of the statistics shared are truly remarkable, and I’m incredibly pleased to see how much exposure desktop Mac software is receiving.

Little Fin

Little Fin are the developers behind two popular Mac apps – Chronicle and Compartments. Before the launch of the App Store, Little Fin noted that they received an average of 6-10 sales per day of each application.

During the launch period, Compartments was selected as a “featured” application on the Mac App Store. This lead to an enormous jump in sales; 1,500 on the first day, and over 1,000 on each subsequent day since.

Their second application, Chronicle, was not a featured piece of software on the new store, but has still been selling around 100 copies per day. In addition to this, a presence in the Mac App Store is also leading to an increase in the number of downloads from their own website.

Little Fin feel really strongly about the importance of the App Store:

The Mac App Store has provided us with an audience large enough that we have been able to lower our prices substantially and still bring in dramatically increased revenue. We are reaching a lot more people than we ever did before, which means we are getting wonderfully motivating positive feedback and well thought-out suggestions. The effect has been so dramatic it almost feels like our business didn’t even really start until now.

Evernote

A few days after the App Store launched, Evernote announced a fascinating set of statistics about the number of signups they’d received over the launch period.

For me, this hit home how many Mac users out there don’t really know about the amazing range of third party software available. If you’re a regular AppStorm reader, it’s easy to assume that everyone has heard about widespread software such as Evernote. Their statistics would seem to suggest that this really isn’t the case, and it’s great to see the additional exposure and promotion that the Mac App Store is able to bring for developers.

DaisyDisk

Although DaisyDisk wasn’t one of Apple’s “featured” applications, Taras Brizitsky explained that they have still seen a big surge in interest. In the last three days, the company has seen a ten fold increase in sales from the Mac App Store than from their own site.

They received a large spike in support requests during the first day of the launch, but this has since returned to normal (most requests were concerned with customers migrating from the old version to the Mac App Store release).

iBank

iBank is a popular financial management application, available on the App Store from day one. We spoke to the Scott Marc Becker, the managing director of IGG Software, who shared the following:

We’re really pleased with the Mac App Store, much as we expected to be. Our prior experience selling iBank Mobile through the original App Store has been fantastic, and the new App Store seems to have brought iBank an entirely new universe of customers. After just these first few days, I can’t say whether sales at our site are up as a result of our visibility in the Mac App Store – they’ve been running really high, as they typically do this time of year. But they definitely are not down – we’ve seen no cannibalization so far.

So at this stage we’ve got no reason to sell through the Mac App Store exclusively. It seems to be just another great channel, much as our retail package appeals to a person who’d rather have a disc than a download. Right now we feel that’s the three-legged stool for serving the greatest number of customers however they prefer: site downloads, the Mac App Store and a retail product.

Regarding support, we generally see an uptick in requests in this season tied to year-end: getting last year’s financial house in order, resolutions to save more in the new year, tax preparation and so on. More customers come on board and that means more questions. The Mac App Store happened to land in the midst of all that, so we’re a bit backlogged after some time off for the holidays. Fortunately we’ve built up a library of video tutorials for iBank 4, and that’s done a great job of helping new users with the basics. And some folks still read manuals – the iBank User Manual is now available as well, and many Mac users are happy to figure things out on their own.

Marketcircle

Without disclosing particular financial data, Marketcircle told us that they’d seen a three fold increase in regular daily sales of Billings from the Mac App Store alone, along with no noticeable decline in sales processed in-house.

They also saw an increase in support requests due to unforeseen complications that they weren’t aware of prior to the launch of the store, such as apps showing up installed (when in fact they aren’t the Mac App Store version), and people inquiring about migrating previously purchased versions. The company hasn’t seen an increase in sales through their own web store, however internal sales have remained strong with the launch of the Mac App Store.

When asked about the possibility of going exclusive, Marketcircle noted:

The Mac App Store has been great so far, however with Apple’s current model in place it would be impossible to sell all of the products we develop exclusively through the Mac App Store. For example, Daylite and Billings Pro both have background processes and headless servers, both of these are currently forbidden by the rules. We believe that rules will be relaxed in the future and we’ll re-examine our options at that time.

Kiwi App

Interestingly, the trend doesn’t seem to be the same for all applications. The developers of Kiwi told us that they were disappointed with sales on the first day, so subsequently dropped the price down to 99¢. Sales the next day were in the hundreds of units – much better than average – but total revenue was similar to non-Mac App Store daily revenue. Since then, unit sales have decreased slightly but remain high.

Interestingly, sales on their own store immediately dropped to zero, even before the reduction in price on the Mac App Store. This conflicts slightly with the experience of other developers, and shows that the same trend isn’t apparent across the board.

Alfred

This fantastic application launcher publicly stated that their downloads made up around 3% of the 1 million downloads on day one of the App Store, implying downloads of around 30,000 in the first day alone.

One of the Most Popular “App Store Exclusive” Apps

Another developer, who we’ve agreed to keep anonymous, is one of the highest profile “App Store Exclusive” developers, who immediately took the plunge of selling solely through this medium. They found sales to increase in the “ten folds ballpark”, with support requests also increasing by around the same 10x amount.

Going exclusive immediately seems to have worked for several apps, but it’s by no means a widespread trend across the board. Most companies are offering this as an additional sales outlet – at least in the short term.

Realmac Software

And finally, Realmac software shared a set of statistics on their own blog this week, highlighting how the launch has gone for them. Their approach was to dramatically drop the price of the – now Mac App Store exclusive – Courier, and continue to sell RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper in both locations.

Although LittleSnapper didn’t fare as well as their other two pieces of software initially, Realmac have today announced a huge discount on this app for the next few days. LittleSnapper is currently available for $4.99 until the 17th Jan (previously costing $39). It’ll be interesting to see whether this pushes LittleSnapper into the top downloads list. I hope so, as it’s a fantastic piece of software.

Will they be going App Store exclusive in the future? It seems so:

When we release LittleSnapper 2 (sometime this year) and RapidWeaver 6 (which, whilst on our roadmap, is still a long way off) we’ll almost certainly go App Store exclusive with these apps. The ease of use of the App Store, compared to any store a developer can ‘roll themselves’, will soon become a competitive advantage for developers – the App Store almost entirely eliminates the barriers associated buying software. Sticking with our own store would not only make the purchase and registration of our apps a hassle, but each sale outside the Mac App Store obviously doesn’t count towards Apple’s chart positions.

It’s a Big Deal

For a company to receive a ten fold increase in customers and sales in a single day is fantastic, and it’s hard to overstate just how important this new sales channel is – particularly for high profile developers with a great product. All this considering that the Mac App Store launch wasn’t hugely publicised, and came in the form of a relatively simple Software Update (that many users won’t yet have even been prompted to download).

Mac developers have never had a more ubiquitous way to promote and distribute their software, and I’m excited for two reasons. First, because developers will see a huge, well deserved pay-off for the time and hard work dedicated to their software. And second, that thousands more Mac users will discover what a phenomenal range of software we have available for the platform.

Ultimately, I think it’s great news for everyone.