Quick Review – GeoStrings

Many people seem to have a problem with Palm’s implementation of a native Tasks app, claiming that it just isn’t robust enough. I have less of a problem with this because I don’t really use the Tasks app all that often. It could benefit from a few extra features, though. But to be honest, no matter what Palm does to update the native Tasks app on the phone, they’ll likely never come close to the awesomeness that is GeoStrings.

GeoStrings comes to webOS courtesy of Hademi (on the App Catalog for $2.99), the creative force behind the sensational Music Player (Remix) app that graced the Homebrew scene early in the days of the Palm Pre, adding vital functionality to the basic Music app available for your phone. With GeoStrings, Hedami again adds functionality to a standard webOS function (Tasks), but this time by creating an all new environment for it to exist in rather than pasting on new features like in Music Player (Remix). GeoStrings is a task reminder app that allows you to be reminded of certain things based on where you are geographically using your phone’s built in GPS unit, rather than using an arbitrary date on the calendar.

To put this idea into perspective, every Wednesday when I go to work I like to grab a copy of the Village Voice, a publication in New York City that runs once a week and is free. More often than not I’ll forget to do this for a few hours until the end of the work day, or sometimes I’ll forget for a day or two. If I were to set a reminder in my Tasks app to get the Village Voice on every week, I’d be reminded as soon as it hit 12:00AM every Wednesday. Then I’d have to live with my phone having that notification at the bottom of the screen the entire rest of the day, or dismiss it and never be reminded again. With GeoStrings, I simply create a new event “pick up Village Voice”, set it to remind me on Wednesday (and it can be reoccurring or not, based on my choices), and most importantly, have it set to remind me when I was a certain distance away from work. I punch in the address to my job, or select it from my list of contacts where my job’s address is already stored, and just as easy as that, a useful reminder is set in store to make sure I don’t forget to pick up my copy. Even more useful is that it does include a “snooze” function with more than one selectable amount of time. I can snooze for 5 minutes or 30 minutes if I know I won’t be able to get to the task at hand right away. Very useful functionality.

The app has a great look and feel to it. Everything is pretty self explanatory, and even if you aren’t sure of what something is supposed to do, just tap the question mark, and everything on the screen becomes a nugget of information just waiting for you to discover exactly what function it carries out. As I said previously, when creating new events or tasks, you need to punch in an address so the app knows when to remind you of what you have to do. There are a few ways of doing this. You can either search for a business or location name, enter the address fully if you already know it, retrieve and use whatever location you currently are in, search your phone’s contact list for existing addresses associated with contacts, or finally choose from a list of favorites that you manage. A wide variety of options to make sure you are storing the information you need accurately. If you happen to pass by a new store you want to check out next time you’re in the area, simply set a reminder using your current location, without having to hunt for an address on the sign, and next time you’re in the area you will be reminded to go inside and have a look around. If you know you’re going to forget to buy something on your grocery list next time you’re out, set a reminder for a vital ingredient to pop up next time you’re close to the supermarket.

The customization of GeoStrings is pretty robust. You can set up default snooze times, as well as completely edit which time intervals you want to appear on-screen when you ask the app to remind you of an event later on. You can set a default radius reminder for events so if you know you *always* want to be reminded 2 miles away from something, that’s what you’ll be offered every time. Of course you can always change this when creating a new event regardless. You can let the app play a default audio alert when it reminds you of tasks, or choose from any audio file you have on your phone whether it’s a stock ringtone or any mp3s you’ve loaded on. You can even change the opacity of the main screens so a little bit of that Google Maps-esque background can show through the attractive light blue UI.

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