Lumiappaday #23: Due Dates demoed on the Nokia Lumia 800

Here’s another homescreen related app, it’s called Due Dates, also recommended (around 10 days ago) by Self. It’s an application that allows  you pin important dates you need a reminder of on your homescreen, whilst also brightening up your homescreen with colourful tiles or photos. From the name I thought this might have something to do with expectant mothers and their new baby. Well it could be, but it can be many more dates. Calendars are great, but if you have a lot of appointments, you might miss the more crucial events.

 #23) Due Dates

Price: £0.79 / $0.99

Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/c6b2daa1-9fe5-4f0b-b47f-64fabb3df6fa

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjed1uAmApo

Developer Blurb:

All of us have many important days in our life as birthdays, events, meetings, special days and more… We admit that it is very difficult to remember all these days all the time. So, here is what Due Dates app comes to do – it will help you remember all those dates. You just need to enter your dates and the app will save these dates for you and display your dates with a countdown of days to the left – so you won’t forget your wedding date, or your wife’s birthday; you even can tell your wife how many days left for her next birthday… View your dates in different 4 views: Soon, Future, Past and All date.

– more info in the link above.

 

Rating: 9

Design: 9

Like Number 22) this is mostly plain but it makes better use of the panoramic metro UI by splitting dates into:

• All (for every dates you’ve ever set)
• Soon
• Future
• Past

It’s pretty clean interface. Each date is set into a rectangle defining what the event is with a square portion on the left selling you how many days since or has past from that event (and a little date when the event is/was). The colour of these rectangles is identical to the colour-scheme you set as a theme. Nice touch.

When you set the tile, you can set to two different colours, flipping to different. I really like that they’re live. The app itself may not be the best looking but it does make your homescreen look great – it’s up to you whether you want to chose images, bright colourful tiles, pastels etc.

Apparently according to the app page, the rectangles should now be actual tiles for Mango. And yes, that is possible. Go to settings and change the views to tiles or list view. It doesn’t look like the tiles on the homescreen unfortunately, and the tile writing fonts are upside down for some reason. In this instance since the tiles aren’t working in tiles view, I prefer the rectangles view.

Usability 8:

This app is fairly straight forward. To add button is always visible at the bottom (+).

Just fill in details such as the date, title, occurance (very helpful if it’s a Birthday/Anniversary) and a description. You can also set yourself a reminder.

The only thing I find odd is that reminder is set to today’s date and the time right now. I think it should be set at least a day before or on the day of the event itself.

Unfortunately once you’re done, you don’t get the immediate prompt to pin the event to your homescreen. You have to tap on it again (maybe useful if you want to have lots of dates but only want events appearing soon on your homescreen)

When you click on the pin icon, the item isn’t immediately pinned. It will ask you again if you want to pin to the start. Clik on that again and you have a nice personalization screen where you can see both forground and background tile appearance.

The front tile, you can change the colour and add a picture. The front tile displays the event name. The background tile you can change the colour. The background tile then displays how many days left as well as well the name again.

You can then save/share/pin or delete.

A really nice feature I only found through settings is importing dates (and so not in the video demo).

This is pretty neat. My Lumia 800 already syncs my google/uni calendar so it’s great that I have the option to have all my entries there. However, you don’t have to flood your Due Dates calendar (otherwise it would defeat the purpose of picking out special dates). So you can go from import dates. To select it, you click the left hand side (there’s no tick box option – it works like ticking in email). Once that’s done appears in your dates.

Performance: 9

As usual, starts quickly, no delay, no lag, quick to navigate the UI. Yet to experience any instability.

The tiles themselves work as advertised.

Only oddity are the upside down fonts, not sure what’s causing that.

Price: 10

£0.79. Low price, good effort from the developer making a really useful app you will use again and again.

Category: Applications, Lumiappaday, Nokia, Video, Windows Phone