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Can you imagine how shocked I was when I found out, that there is no way for an app to throw an alert, when the app closed? Well it is not totally impossible. There is a way: 1) you set up a server on your own; 2) when your app has to schedule some alert for the iPhone device it's running on, the app sends a request with this iPhone's ID and all the info to your server; 3) your server forwards it to Apple; 4) Apple sends it to iPhone. The description is probably not accurate, but it is only because I stopped to read the Apple documentation after I read the step number 1.

So all I have done until this bitter cognizance is just the interface for my reminder. The idea was: you type in the info you want to be reminded about, chose a time amount like "in 4 hours" and click a button. Can it be simpler? However, I had to stop this app development.

After AutoCam was out I still have missed a simple notification app. There are tons of similar apps on the AppStore, but they either miss the notifications or they are just... too fancy, too complicated; they just don't work, don't look, and don't feel as I wish :-). And then I got a new idea: it could just schedule the notifications on my server and the server would send them to me as E-mails at the time I selected in the app. This would already work for me, since I'm almost always online or even if I see a notification a few hours later it is not critical, because I don't intend to use this notifications for reminding me of taking some medicine or so. It's rather "take care of car insurance". This would already work for me. Of course it would be even better if I could send a SMS to my iPhone -- this would give me the long anticipated instant notifications, but this would require some involvement of a SMS sending service and then it's already kind of a business I have to take care of...

But then my friend Ulan reminded me of Google Calendar Service. A Google Calendar can send E-mails & SMS as notifications for your events. And this is all I need! This is even better because I don't need to set up a server and everybody else could use such an app! And the best was: there were a few simple technical steps until this goal. The result was Remindum.

At the moment I'm already using Remindum for a few weeks. It works like a charm. I also have subscribed to my Google Calendar in iCal and now I can see all the reminders in my desktop calendar application.

I'm happy! :-)

This is not quite true. There is another kind of
people -- and I know such people -- they lose their data over and over
again and they just don't do backups... Stupid? Oh yeah.

But it can be even worse. There is even a fourth kind of people. People
like me. They ALWAYS do backups, but even they sometime lose data. How?

It happened once in my life when I was getting familiar with unix and
was setting up a backup of my data with rsync. Then the first backup...
and I lost my data. You know why?

Accidentally I MIXED UP THE SOURCE AND THE DESTINATION PATH.