Review: Friends Birthday
Score:
70%
Launched in the Ovi Store (as freeware) is 'Friends Birthday', a small app with a heart of gold - in that it will endear itself to you and you to your friends, as you seemingly remember (and do something about) all their birthdays. Using your Facebook information, Ewan has taken a look at Friends birthday below - it's well worth a download.
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
Friends Birthday is a simple application, but it’s a signpost of what a connected device can achieve with a bit of lateral thinking. I also suspect that it may just save a user a round of embarrassment in the future – so developers Marvellous should be congratulated on their tiny contribution to world peace.
What we have here is, from a programmer’s point of view, a pretty interface that uses your Facebook account to look at your list of friends, downloads when their birthdays are, and then does two interesting things with that information.
The first is to show you when those birthdays are, either in one long list sorted by date, or in a more user friendly month view calendar, which allows you to click through on any date (pink means there’s a birthday on that date) and see which of your friends is due a present or a card.
Both of these lists are clear and easy to use (and cope with auto-rotate nicely), and while the interface reminds me of the cover of The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” it probably hits right in with the target user base. Yes it breaks the S60 style guide, but it does keep the soft-key buttons in the right place to all intents, so manages to be a bit rebellious and follow the rules in the same breath.
The second function of the program allows you to send a (virtual) Birthday card to your friends – in the hope that (a) they think you actually treasure them more than just ignoring their birthday or (b) you missed the last post and need to get something to them as soon as possible.
All of this life-saving ability just needs you to log into your Facebook account and away you go. Thankfully, Friends Birthday uses the Facebook Connect method of logging in, so if your phone ever goes missing, you can stop it accessing your account direct from your Facebook account. Smart coding all round from the developers there.
For those of us who can remember working away for long nights on A.I. routines for board games, strategy simulations for Formula 1 management (yup, that was me - Ed), or the intricacies of a double entry bookkeeping accounting app; well, we might look down on the apparent simplicity of this app, but that’s the wrong approach. Not only has this app found a feature that is lacking on the S60 handset (seriously, try using Calendar to organise 600 birthdays…), but it implements it in a way that is simple to use on the device, looks cool, and doesn’t ask you to input all the information on the handset.
And it’s free. I’d say it’s worth a look.
Ewan Spence
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at