Oct 25

CalAlrm

One of the great things about the iPhone is that it manages your calendars. You can bring together all your calendars, MobileMe, Gmail, iCal and Entourage alike. One of the less than stellar aspects of the iPhone is the notifications of said calendars. Darth Jobs has chosen not to allow a snooze function on the iPhone. You have to set up multiple reminders in your calendar to gain that functionality.  While that is an option, it’s very un-Apple like in terms of usability. Thankfully, he allows others to bridge that gap (at a price). Maybe he is smarter than I give him credit for. He is, after all, the CEO of two multi-billion dollar companies, where I am just some poor schlep who critiques the hard work of others. So what do I know? I’ll tell you. Give in to the brilliance of Master Jobs and spend the 99 cents to get Calendar Alarm. It’s the full featured calendar application Apple should have delivered.

CalAlarmSnooze

Any calendars with existing alarms that are synced to your iPhone will be synced to Calendar Alarm upon opening it. Once those events have been synced, it’s time for the application to shine. Not a fan of the short, quick default ring of the native calendar alert? Calendar Alarm has two options for the duration of an alarm, 10 or 30 seconds. You can also select one of 12 different alarm tones. While I appreciate the options, the sound options are just ok. Most of the sounds are obnoxious, which makes sense since a nice relaxing sound may not encourage you to do something about the reminder. Those options however, allow you to assign different sounds to different calendars. Think of it as ringtones for your calendars.

All those features are great, but, hands down, the single best feature that more than makes this application worth the 99 cents is the snooze feature. In the settings you have the option to set a default snooze time, any where from 60 minutes to 60 seconds. I am not sure why anyone would want to be reminded to do something every 60 seconds, unless they are the dude from Memento. Then it makes complete sense.

CalAlarmSet

The only thing that could make this feature more valuable is to allow for a user defined variable snooze. That is, I can set a default alarm at 30 minutes and when the event alarm pops up, I hit the snooze button and define the next reminder to come back in fifteen minutes instead of thirty (I have received word that this function will be part of their v1.2 release that will be released soon). This app could easily go for two or three times as much and be completely worth the price with the upcoming features. My recommendation? Set up a reminder to go download Calendar Alarm and when the event pops up… don’t hit snooze.


Questions or have an app that you want reviewed? Send an email to: omiwebdesigninfo@gmail.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @matt_briseno

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