Birthday Reminder

Ever miss a birthday? I did. That's why I created Birthday Reminder to remind myself of when birthdays are coming.

Birthday Reminder 3.0.1 (274KB)
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What can it do?

• Remind you of approaching birthdays, of course!
• Find contacts matching a name or birthday
• Edit a contact's birthday
• Send an e-mail or go to Apple's iCards Web site
• Export the birthdays to an iCal-compatible file, complete with event alarms

See the development status.

	Reminders panel Preferences panel
Birthdays window

This program is available under the GNU Public License at SourceForge.net.

Background

Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes a useful program called Address Book. As its name suggests, it stores addresses, telephone numbers, and other contact information. It also stores birthdays. Before creating Birthday Reminder, I had already dilligently added my friends' and family members' birthdays to Address Book. But unless I checked Address Book every day, I didn't know when any of those birthdays were coming.

Unlike most other reminder programs, Birthday Reminder uses Address Book as its main repository, or database. Since Apple had already provided every Mac OS X user with a functional one, I didn't see the need to create a separate one for my little program. It also greatly simplified any data structures and files that I needed to create.

For all intents and purposes, version 3 is the real -- and final -- version of Birthday Reminder. It contains all of the features that I wanted from day one. Since I've completed my list of to-dos, I won't be updating it with new features any more. Subsequent versions will be bug fixes.

Development Status

version 3.0.1 - released May 28, 2003

• fixed application crashing due to audio file not being loaded by Quicktime correctly on non-English systems
• fixed preference window's date format setting not updating correctly
• fixed export of European accented characters
• fixed sorting of found birthdays
• fixed reminders window not opening at scheduled time
• preferences are saved immediately after they've been changed/updated
• added year of birth to exported birthdays' descriptions
• added localized date format for birthdays and reminders list
• minor interface fixes

version 3.0 - released Apr 12, 2003

• new application icon (thanks Diana Todd!)
• find contacts by name or birthday
• export either all or selected birthdays
• added iCal event alarm support
• send an email to a person with an upcoming birthday
• link to Apple's iCards site
• uses Quicktime to playback alert sounds, thereby adding more file formats that can be used (yay, MP3!)
• speaks status messages (U.S. English only due to a limitation in Mac OS X's speech engine)
• comprehensive (more or less) Help files
• fixed failure to update some of preference panel's items
• behind-the-scenes code cleanup and optimizations
• Known issues:
  • if you found any birthdays and then sorted the table by another column, all of your birthdays from your Address Book will be reloaded. (fixed in 3.0.1)
  • preference window's date format setting doesn't "stick" across sessions (fixed in 3.0.1)
  • reminders window may not open at scheduled time (fixed in 3.0.1)
  • unable to play back sounds on non-English systems, possibly due to localized folder names (fixed in 3.0.1)

version 2.6.1 - released Apr 4, 2003

• French localization (thanks Jean-Baptiste Boulanger!)

version 2.6 - released Mar 12, 2003

• tables can be sorted by column (finally!)
• save window frames
• German localization (thanks "pete"!)
• improved localization (for translators/developers)
• Known issues:
  • some of preference panel's fields are not updated when it is initially opened (fixed in 3.0)

version 2.5 - released Mar 11, 2003

• export birthdays list to iCal-compatible file (.ics)
• people with the same name can have their birthdays updated
• links to relevant SourceForge Web pages in Help menu
• updated for localization (I need translators!)
• behind-the-scenes changes
• a lame Easter Egg
• Known issues:
  • inability to choose which birthdays to export, i.e. all-or-nothing (fixed in 3.0)
  • non-English names may not appear in iCal correctly (fixed in 3.0.1)

version 2.1 - released Feb 14, 2003

• fixed problem where Birthday Reminder would quit on launch if a first name or last name of a contact was missing. Thanks to those who were patient enough to help me work this out.
• Known issues:
  • previous preferences are lost when a new version is used (fixed in 2.5)
  • birthdays cannot be saved if there are multiple contacts with the same name (fixed in 2.5)

version 2.0 - released Feb 11, 2003

• toolbar
• preferences for date format, alert sound, advance days and scheduled reminder
• edit birthday directly, without needing to open Address Book
• Known issue:
  • tables can be sorted in ascending order and only with one column (fixed in 2.6)

version 1.0 - released Feb 3, 2003

• Known issues:
  • program will quit if any contacts are lacking first name or name (fixed in 2.1)
  • window locations are not saved (fixed in 2.6)

Copyright © 2002 Yuhui's World of Wonder