black entertainment news: Checkmark for iPhone review

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Checkmark for iPhone review

Checkmark is a new productivity app that lets you create location and time-based reminders on your iPhone... and to create them wickedly fast -- as in, only 3 taps! Checkmark will keep your reminders organized by location and distance, making it easy to see what needs to be done closest to you.

One of the biggest reasons Checkbook offers such quick entry is that you must first spend time to save your most used locations. You can add a location by searching the map, adding your current location, or importing from your contacts. Next you choose a radius for the location: 100, 150, 300, 800, or 1600 feet. This is a great feature because for some locations you may want a reminder when you're in the general neighborhood, thus reminding you to actually make a stop there, and for other locations you may only want a reminder when you are basically at the indicated location. For each location, you can also assign it a custom name and one of the 9 different included icons.

Once you're set up, you're ready to start creating reminders! To create a location-based reminder, just tap one of your saved locations in the Where tab. This will take you to a screen that shows you all the reminders you have created for that location and can sort them by Current or Done. To add a reminder, tap the plus sign. For each reminder, you can add a title, note, and select whether to be reminded when you arrive or when you depart from that location. If you tap the timer button next to the Departure button, you can choose to be reminded 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes after you arrive at (or depart from) the location.

Creating a time-based reminder is done similarly, except you switch to the When tab on the home screen. Instead of Arrival, Departure, and Timer buttons, time-based reminders will have one button for selecting a date and time in the creation screen.

To view an organized list by location and distance, tap the list icon in the upper righthand corner of the the Where tab.

Two of the biggest missing features in Checkmark are the lack of snooze and the inability to create recurring reminders.

The good

Super fast entry
Displays saved locations in a grid
Set a timer with location, like 15 minutes after you get home
Set a radius with each location

The bad

Cannot create recurring reminders (like to take vitamins every day at 7a)
No snooze feature

The conclusion

Checkmark is an incredibly fast location and time-based reminders app that is extremely functional. It's clear that a lot of thought went into its design as not only is it efficient, but also attractive. Although I agree that that Checkmark is the fastest way to manually enter a location or time-based reminder into your iPhone, it's still not as fast as "Siri, remind me to do laundry when I get home". With that said, Apple's built-in Reminders app (that Siri uses) doesn't let you assign timers to location-based reminders -- something I find to be extremely valuable about Checkmark.