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Due (iApp)

Issue: 9.3 (March/April 2011)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,014
Starting Page Number: 14
Article Number: 9303
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.dueapp.com/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/due/id390017969?mt=8&

Full text of article...

My chief annoyance with the iPhone's calendar alarm is that there's no snooze feature. If an alarm goes off, you have to either dismiss it or view it, which is often inconvenient if you're in the middle of something else. If you dismiss the alarm and forget about it, you'll miss an appointment or deadline. Not good.

Enter Due, a simple and beautiful iOS app for creating reusable timers and reminders.

Timers count down to a deadline. For instance, as a diabetic I periodically need to test my blood sugar two hours after eating. With Due, I just flip on the timer and it counts down and rings a bell when the two hours have elapsed. I have timers for other things, such as telling me when I need to check on my cooking food or waking me up from a power nap.

You can create as many timers as you need and name them, so they're easy to reuse.

Reminders go off at a certain date and time. You can make them repeatable—daily, weekly, or monthly. There are quick buttons to move the time forward by ten minutes or an hour or move it to the next day (great for a task you've decided you just can't finish today).

Unfortunately, that flexibility isn't offered when an alarm goes off: to snooze or change it, you have to open the app. However, instead of just going off once, Due's alarms can auto-snooze—that means it will continue to remind you of the event every minute until you dismiss it inside the app. If you've ever missed an alarm that only went off one time, you'll find that feature vital (you can turn that feature off on a per-alarm basis for non-critical reminders).

With iOS 4's support for multitasking, alarms run in the background, so you don't have to leave Due running to be notified of an event.

There are many other alarm apps, but Due's elegance and simplicity make it one of the best. Even complicated alarms take only a few taps to set up, and there are lots of little shortcuts that make working with it shockingly fast. I love that I can have multiple alarms and timers and that they're reusable. Due can even sync your alarms via Dropbox so if you have multiple iOS devices, they can all share the same alarms (very cool).

If you need reminding, definitely give Due its due.

End of article.