I find myself constantly in need of setting reminders during the day. Whether it’s because I’m experimenting with Pomodoro-style work breaks, needing to remember to hop on a conference call, or just needing a quick note that it’s time to start working on a new long-term project, I set dozens of reminders for myself each week. However, while I’m reasonably happy with my reminder options on the iPhone, I wanted to find a good reminder option for my Mac as well. That’s why I decided to check out Remind, developed by Owen Lehmer.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

Remind is a Mac app that allows users to quickly set up reminders, all from a convenient menu bar icon.

Pros

• Takes up very little space on your hard drive
• Can be configured to start up automatically
• Easily paused from the menu bar

Cons

• Times can only be entered in minutes, timers must be rounded to the nearest minute (So if you want to set a timer for your reminder for 30 minutes and 30 seconds from now, you need to set the timer for either 30 minutes or 31 minutes
• Timer needs to be paused between countdowns if you don’t want it to start looping around again automatically
• When the reminder window pops up, there is no noise associated with the event. If you’re across the room when the reminder goes off and can’t see the screen, you might miss your reminder!

Discussion

Remind is one of those Mac apps that you will either love completely or utterly despite. For many people, it’s great because it has a simple interface, takes mere seconds to set up, and has automatically recurring reminders. That makes this app great for reminders of the same type at regular intervals during the day, like “get up and stretch,” “stay hydrated,” “have a snack,” or “check traffic on new site.”

However, I think there are plenty of users out there who will find this app to simplistic. While it is fast to set up, the app doesn’t have any alarm sounds built in, which seems like kind of a big oversight. It would be nice to have the sounds built in, with the option to turn them off, or replace them with your own audio files.

I also dislike that you have to enter your timer durations in minutes. If you want a timer to go off every hour and a half, you have to enter 90 minutes. If you need a timer that’s down to the second, this app won’t help: you can’t enter fractions of minutes.

Conclusion and download link

If you like your menu bar apps to be bare bones, minimal, and really simple to operate, this is the app for you. However, if you like to have a lot more flexibility and customization options with your reminders and timers, this app may frustrate you by being too simple. It really comes down to a matter of taste. This is a solid app that sets out to be a simple tool for setting up reminders, and it does the job just fine.

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 1.2

Supported OS: OS X 10.6 or later

Download size: 1.2 MB

Remind on Mac App Store