First Look at Checkmark for iOS: Reminders on Steroids

Apple did every iPhone user a great service by adding in its Reminders app to iOS 5. With full Siri integration, it allowed them to create a quick list of tasks or simple reminders so that they’d know what they needed to do throughout their day. But it’s missing a key ingredient: location awareness.

Enter Checkmark by Snowman, which solves that problem.

Checkmark allows users to name locations (such as Home, Office, Grocery Store, etc.) and they can then add reminders based on those locations. Users can tell Checkmark to notify them within a certain timeframe as they approach a preset location – and they can even define how close they need to be to the location before they are notified. Better still, if you are prone to “forget the milk” when you go grocery shopping, Checkmark can remind you after you leave the location that you were supposed to pick it up. (Note: Location-based reminders are available only for iPhone 4 or 4S)

Checkmark is quick and the amount of time it takes to get used to is just as quick. The user interface is slick, elegant and simple, which is ideal if you’ve designed an app that is trying to usurp one that was created by Apple.

In fact, Checkmark already has Apple’s Reminders beaten in several areas. For example, you can create location-based reminders in only 3 steps with Checkmark, compared to 11 in Apple’s Reminders app. And time-based reminders can be created in only 3 steps as well, compared to 8 in Apple’s Reminders app. So not only is Checkmark simple to use and fast, it is simpler and faster to use than Apple’s own Reminders app.

And the team at Snowman has also developed a pretty cool video to promote Checkmark, which you can watch below:

(I’ll be giving Checkmark the “30 Days With” treatment here at Lifehack, so check back here in a couple of weeks for a more comprehensive review — as well as to see how the app holds up over an entire month of use.)

To celebrate its launch, Checkmark is only 99 cents for a limited time in The App Store – and it is worth every penny. If you’ve been looking for Reminders on steroids, then Checkmark is the app for you.

Mike Vardy is the Managing Editor at Lifehack. An independent writer, speaker, podcaster and "productivityist", you can read more of his writing at Vardy.me. He is @mikevardy on Twitter.

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