11Jan2011

Notificant: Your personal messaging service

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First, a little bit of history. I was personally involved with this application during its inception. The CEO of the company that makes this app, Caramel Cloud, was co-founder of this blog, also former editor. The CTO is Preshit, who also manages iXyr, the company that powers this blog. And, we’re good friends. So you can see that I have every reason to be biased in writing this review. I won’t. You’ll see why. The app is called Notificant.

So what is Notificant anyway? It’s an application-service that shuttles messages between your devices, and through time. And it’s freaky cool. From their blog:

Utilising a free Caramel Cloud account, Notificant can create notifications that can be fired at a scheduled time on your current Mac or on any of the others you own. It can even whisk them off to your email address. It lives in the menu bar and stays out of your way until you need it. The simple UI makes it a cinch to create a notification within seconds.

The real world applications for this service is only limited by your imagination (and the current lack of iOS clients). For instance, let’s see how it works as a todo list manager. Bring up the new notification dialog using the global hotkey. It’s a simple window with limited options. Enter your notification text (160 characters), schedule a time (it automatically sets it half an hour from the current time), and the devices you want to send it to.

Devices? The Caramel Cloud account will keep track of all your registered devices; all you have to do is install the app and log in. So if that task is office related, and you’re at home, you can assign it to only show on your office Mac. The workflow is really simple (I know they’ve broken their heads over this). “Print out project report” » “14/01/2011 10:00 AM” » “Office Mac Pro”. And it’s gone into the cloud. The next morning you’re just about catching up with the day’s work, totally forgotten about that print task, when in pops the notification. Coworker shows you a funny video that you don’t can’t watch during office hours: just make it fire during break time, or on your iMac at home, when you get home.

This simple workflow can be applied to anything that can be said in a sentence. You could remind yourself to check out a certain article. Or an appointment two weeks from now. You can even remind yourself to get up and stretch 25 minutes from now, because the notifications are unlimited and free. Also, one of the ‘devices’ is your email address, so you can get notified on your iOS device as well (I can neither confirm nor deny that iOS client apps are in the works).

Have you ever composed an email and sent it to yourself just to remind yourself of something? With Notificant at your beck and call, that is a thing of the past.

When you do want to take a moment and look at your days ahead, you can open the web app to create and edit your notifications in a beautiful web app. I should mention that the user interface designs for the application and web front-ends have been done by some of the best names in the industry. I love how the new notification window uses completely native UI, and the menubar icon doesn’t conflict by sporting a mix of colours (it glows a Tweetie style vibrant blue when there’s a new message pending). The web app on the other hand goes all out in pixel finesse (the fine work of Sebastian Nitu).

Things to complain about: first and foremost, the lack of iOS clients is sad; you can imagine how great that would be. The notification sounds, while quite vibrant and chirpy, are too long for notifications. I’d also have liked to send notifications to other users — like a quick and dirty messaging system — or at least email addresses other than my own.

View the original article here