With our increasingly busy lives it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of all the little tasks. Simply writing it down as a task doesn’t help if we don’t remember to look at our note or task management app.
This is where Notificant comes in. The cloud-based app, which has been received enthusiastically on the Mac as well, gives you a nudge at the right moment. Wherever you are.
Reminders deluxe
The one and only goal of Notificant is to deliver push or email reminders to you – via the web interface, on any of your Macs and on iDevices with internet access.
Notificant has come from web to iPhone
Basically, Notificant is a cloud based service that provides interfaces on other platforms to make the creation of reminders easier.
Creating Reminders on the iPhone
The iPhone app comes with a subtle design, keeping everything very basic yet elegant. There are two tabs – one for upcoming alarms set to go off and an archive for past notifications. On the very top of the window you have the choice between adding a new reminder or going into the options panel.
Upcoming notifications and archived reminders
When creating a new task, which at least for the moment is only possible in portrait mode, you’ll be reminded of Twitter: the limit for your text is 160 characters and you can shorten inserted links. This makes it very clear that Notificant is not intended to be a task management app. It is meant for quick notes, which can be used together with task management, but setting a reminder in Notificant about an upcoming music album release or about not forgetting to call my best friend back makes much more sense to me than creating a task for it in Things, 2do or Wunderlist.
Create a new reminder
When setting your notifications, you can of course set the time the reminder is supposed to fire and you can set how the reminder is to be delivered.
Set time, date and device on which to receive notifications
If you don’t set a time, an alarm will fire automatically almost immediately, but you can also set alarms far into the future. The date and time picker is quite self explanatory, even though I wish there would be a way to quickly go forward a month or so instead of continuously scrolling forward.
As I mentioned in the introduction, Notificant is available on multiple platforms. Being primarily a cloud based app, you can access it via the web interface; there is a Mac app which sits in your menu bar and let’s you create and receive notifications. You can send reminders to your email inbox and you can push to your iDevices which run Notificant.
When you create a new notification on any of these platforms, you can decide where you want to receive the reminder. Imagine having an idea at home or on the road which you’ll need at the office or vice versa. Just create a new reminder and set your office computer or office email as the recipient. Voila.
Receiving notifications
When you set a notification to appear, you can chose among a wide variety of high quality alarm sounds, which actually make you want to look at your device – as opposed to some other Apple system or app sounds that make you dread the reminders.
The push notifications on your iPhone look just like ordinary push messages – a partly transparent overlay appearing on your screen. When you open the notification right away when the push message appears, you will be shown the details of the reminder. Later on, you’ll have a badge icon on the Notificant app (if you enabled it in the settings) and your past reminder will be available in the archives.
Set push options get pushed
I’ve been using Notificant since it appeared in the Mac App Store and have been helping to beta test the iPhone version. During all my time of use, it has always been 100% reliable, making it my go-to app for important reminders because I can be sure that Notificant will fire when needed. There might a slight delay between devices, but usually it has’t been more than one minute. For me, that’s pretty near perfect.
Verdict
Notificant for iPhone is a dead-simple yet stylish solution for all of you looking for a reliable reminder app. It’s not meant to be a task management app or do anything complex. But what it does, it does flawlessly – pushing reminders to almost all your Mac devices and email inboxes.
Notificant shines with a simplicity of use that a lot of applications could benefit from. My only gripe is that, as of now, input is only possible via portrait mode (I know, I am picky that way) and that I’d love to jump ahead in time faster than scrolling day by day. But those are things that do not have any influence on the reliable performance on the app.
But be warned: if you get Notificant for iPhone, you won’t have any excuses anymore for forgetting something. It’s just too easy to create reminders and be reminded. For just $2.99 in the iTunes Store, there’s no way you can go wrong here.