Yearly: Never Miss a Birthday Again

Has it ever happened to you? The sudden realization that a family member, good friend or colleague had their birthday and you missed it? Needless to say, embarrassment and groveling ensues to make it up. After all, most of us wouldn’t be too happy either if someone we cared about forgot our special day.

From now on, there’s a way of never forgetting a birthday again: Meet Yearly, the beautiful birthday reminder app that will let you know in time when to prepare for celebrations.

Get To Know Yearly

When you start yearly for the first time, it will surprise you: most likely, it will magically present you with a number of birthdays from people you know. Just like that.

How does it do it? Easy. Yearly simply pulls the data from the field “birthday” — if available — from your contacts and processes it. Depending on how much information is available, it will tell you how many days until the next happy day and how old that person will turn. The age of the person can only be shown if the year of birth is included in the data, of course. If you’ve kept your contact list tidy and set a photo for each person, that photo will also be pulled into Yearly and immediately beautify the list view.

Not obvious but explained in the settings is the feature to access contact options with a swipe across a single person. That reveals three icons: mail, phone and texting. That’s a really awesome way to send birthday greetings quickly. Alternatively, you can tap a person and access the contact information in the detailed view. You can also add a note to each person — maybe an idea for a present?

In the detailed view (pictured above to the right) you can additionally see the actual birthdate of a person and their zodiac sign. In case you entered a note into that person’s contact card in the address book, that note will be displayed in Yearly as well.

How To Add The Birthday To Your Contacts

Yearly only pulls the information from your address book, so if there’s no birthday information included yet, that’s where you need to add it. This isn’t as intuitive or easy as one would hope for, but doable.

Open the card of the contact you want to edit and the chose from the menu bar: Card – Add Field – Birthday. It will add a field to the card and you can then enter the birthday. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to repeat the process quickly; with a large contact list it can become tedious, but think of the glory that awaits you when you finally get to congratulate people on time.

I tested the synchronization between address book and Yearly with iCloud and the information was available almost instantly within the iPhone app.

Here’s a hint: if you don’t know the birthdays of some of your contacts, check out Facebook. Most of the time, all the information you need is there (Also, you can snatch the profile photos to add to your address book).

Setting Yearly Up To Remind You

Now that you’ve got all the birthdays neatly within Yearly, set the app up to remind you in time.

First and foremost, allow Yearly to send you push notifications. The app will ask you when you fire it up for the first time, but just in case, you can check again with the Notifications in your iPhone’s settings. If you’re running iOS 5, make sure to allow Yearly to appear on the lock screen: tap Yearly within Notifications and scroll to the bottom to ensure the control is set to ON. This way, even if you miss the alarm, you’ll see it the next time you are going to unlock your phone.

Additionally, you can fine tune reminders within Yearly itself. Go to the settings and set the time you want to be notified and how many days in advance. I wish, though, that I could set the “days before” reminder individually for some birthdays. While it’s enough to be reminded of a colleague’s birthday on the very day, special days of family members need more preparation. Depending on how important it is for you to get a birthday present in time, I’d like to give myself a headstart of a day or two.

Verdict

If you are anything like me, your friends have come to live with the fact that you are constantly late with birthday wishes. And if you are like me, you do feel sort of bad about it. I mean, how hard can it be to keep up with birthdays?

After thirty years I have resigned to the fact that I will never figure it out and that I need professional help — and look, Yearly came along.

The ease of use, with all the data already imported, the beautifully designed interface and the tight integration into iOS including notification center make this app a must-have for those who want to be the first to send a Happy Birthday, not the last.