Ondra Horák Surely this has happened to you too. A day full of worries, you don't know where your head is and you have a strange compulsive feeling that you have forgotten something. What could it be? What did I forget? Well, of course, a friend has a holiday, a girlfriend's birthday and it has completely slipped your mind. If you know this scenario well, then the Svátka application is just for you. So let's take a look at this app together.
The Holiday application is from the workshop of the Czech developer Tomáš Doležal and, as the name suggests, it is a very useful application that manages the holidays and birthdays of all your friends and people from Contacts. It works similarly to the competing application iSvátek, which we have already reviewed on our server (link to review).
Immediately after starting the application, it automatically loads all contacts and evaluates holidays according to the first names of individual contacts, assigning them including various diminutives such as Tom, Ondra or Lucka. Of course, it may happen that the application does not assign the name correctly according to the nickname you have stored in the list. It is not a problem to edit any contact using the "Assign holiday" button. There will certainly also be a few people that you have in your contacts only under a nickname. In this case, the very same button will help. A list of names will open for you and you just choose the right one. The application itself will fill in the date and meaning of the word. Which is another significant advantage. Not only will you know when someone's name day is coming up, but you can even surprise that person by knowing what their name means. Another important feature is that if your contact list contains birthday dates, the application can work with them. So you have both a holiday and a birthday for each of your contacts in the Holiday application.
The application itself is divided into four parts, between which you switch at the bottom of the screen, similar to the iPod application. The first one is the Events list. Here we will see a list of holidays and birthdays by date as they follow each other. Therefore, we immediately know what is coming and also what has already escaped us. Under each date, we will see all the contacts that belong to that day. Right next to the contact's name, we see the phone and sms icons. These are used to call us immediately or sending a pre-prepared sms. There are five richly sufficient texts to choose from, to which the application itself adds the address in the fifth case and your signature, which you set in advance. If you don't like the sms, you can add your own, change the current one or even delete one.
The other two parts are very similar. The Days tab will show you all the name dates for the whole year in a nice sequence. For each name that is in your list, the application adds an icon of an animated face according to gender. In the Names tab we can find an alphabetical list of all names in the calendar year and the icon marking is the same as in the previous tab.
The last part is the Contacts tab. Here we find the list of contacts just as we know it directly from the phone, with the only difference, we don't find phone numbers here, but the date of the holiday, birthday and the meaning of the name. After clicking on the contact, we can assign a holiday, send an SMS or make a phone call. At the same time, we see the date of the holiday, birthday, the meaning of the name and, of course, the first and last name. In the lower part of this window, we can create a calendar entry.
In the More tab, we can then edit the preset sms and set signatures.
The application works nicely and reliably, I must say that it really met my expectations. You can easily add all important information to the calendar and have a good overview of when and whom to contact. Quick SMS sending is a quality function that saves your time and the preset messages are really usable. The only thing that brings the application down a little is, in my opinion, the not very successful graphics, even if that is only a subjective opinion, and also the impossibility of editing the birthday date directly in the application. Otherwise, the application is very successful and really worth the price.
Rating: 4,5/5
Hello, thank you for the review.
I would like to add a small comparison with the iSvatek application. Yes, they have similar basic functionality (automatically assigning people from contacts to first names from the calendar and showing who has a holiday and birthday when), but they differ in other things:
1) iSvatek uses push notifications, Svatek allows you to generate calendar events (both for specific contacts individually and collectively). Of course, it is possible to automatically delete the generated events afterwards
2) Svatek also allows you to send the aforementioned pre-prepared text messages
3) The holiday also displays basic information about names (origin, meaning, diminutives) and also allows you to read more detailed information about the given name from external sources directly in the program (wikipedia, libri.cz)
Thank you for your comments on the program, we will hopefully improve the graphics in one of the next versions and also add the editing of the date of birth directly in the application + other functionality that users will need.
Hello Tomas,
I like the application and I'm thinking about buying it, I wonder if it would be possible to set up automatic sending of SMS? With the possibility of setting the sending time and notification that the sms has been sent?
Javas
Great application, it's a shame that something like this is not directly for OSX. I use the address book and iCal and I would really like to be able to do this conveniently on my computer instead of my phone. Not thinking about an OSX version? Another thing that I would like would be to send a wish to an e-mail in the same way that SMS messages are done, including some one-time sending. Please comment, thank you.
Thanks... Sending emails is one of the functionalities that we are considering for the next version of the application.
The OS X version is a good idea, I haven't considered it yet, it might be worth thinking about having the "server" part of the app on the computer, as you write about it, and also being able to replicate the data to the phone (eg. manual assignment of holidays to contacts and similar). I'll think about it.
If you use google calendar, you can import a calendar with holidays and set a reminder for it. So every morning you can see who has a holiday. Simple and functional.
Nowhere is there a mention or proof of whether the application can also show the age for those birthdays, or how many birthdays are expected It's important to me and I've already seen a few apps that had a problem with the correct age display.
Otherwise, I use Occasions - graphically beautiful, functional, notifications work. It doesn't have names, but I believe that they could be done. Manually for sure, but I don't think even a developer would have much to do with it and then one could turn on / off their display. Otherwise, it works with user data in the directory, so if you have a holiday for people in the directory, like a birthday (for me, Name-day), then it displays those holidays as well. And another anniversary.
Age at birthday does not show this at this time. We are including it in the list of functionalities for the next version :)
This would be fine. And I think I would welcome the possibility to turn off the meaning of the name, because probably not everyone needs it. And if they worked on the appearance... It's hard to complain about it, but in short, if the application looks really nice, you'd enjoy buying it, like using it, like to show it off, etc. (that's why I love Occasions)
We will still work on the graphic appearance of the application.
Do you mean the meaning of the name in the introductory overview, or in the contact details?
I mean in the overview, it probably doesn't matter in detail. It would also save space in the overview. I haven't downloaded the app yet, so I haven't tried it, but I'll probably give it a go.
The app is great ;) I just want to ask, I didn't find it at the time, would it be possible to mark only some contacts in the calendar when recording a holiday with the app, possibly all of them, or tick off the ones I would like there, maybe just friends, family ;) it's tech possible? Thanks, I will recommend the app ;)
Thanks for the compliment ;-)
For individual contacts, an entry in the calendar can be generated when you view the details of the contact .. the button at the bottom Calendar - Create entry will then create an entry only for that one specific contact.
Great, thank you very much, I thought that it would probably work, but I couldn't come to terms with it.
Well, finally some Czech application that (hopefully) the developer will take care of better than the one created by iSvátek. The only thing I'm still missing is the possibility that every day at the pre-set time, a notification pops up for me, who has a holiday today. And I can react accordingly. With iSvátek, I was very disappointed that the notifications did not work even for those contacts that had a holiday assigned to them, I simply had to set directly in the application myself when and if it should notify me that something is happening :-/ I apologize for maybe useless question, but somehow I didn't understand it from the article, but is this possible? I just turn on the Holiday for the first time, import contacts, and it will automatically notify me every holiday without any other settings?
Thank you very much for your answer..
Almost without any setup ;-) To make it work as you expect, you need to generate calendar events for all contacts. You can achieve this by clicking on one button ("Generate records" in the contact overview). For your scenario, it has some minor disadvantages: 1) When you add a new contact, it will need to be generated again (maybe I'll add the option "Generate calendar entries automatically for new contacts"). Another disadvantage is that it generates all-day events, i.e. the iPhone will notify you at the beginning of the day (or when you turn it on). I'll think about how to solve this.
It would be nice to try classic notifications at a user-set time and possibly in advance. I already experienced the generation of calendar entries with one application and after a few problems I stopped using it (and went back to Occasions). And there was also a need to generate everything again from time to time in order to add new contacts. But I'm not saying it won't work here.
Too bad it requires iOS 4.1 when you buy it, I'll wait for that one.
Are you still there? ;-)
It seems that people really want push notifications. I would quite like to understand, do you find them better than calendar events? The current implementation of Holiday events is probably not perfect... there are all-day events, ie the iPhone will remind you of them at the beginning of the day (ie maybe right after midnight if your phone is on). I personally like all-day events, but some may not. If it were possible to choose an all-day event or a "non-all-day" event at a globally preset time (for example at ten in the morning), which could still be changed when generating the event for a specific contact, would that fulfill your needs and wishes? Or how (if it worked) would it be worse?
To me personally, those push notifications just come across as a kind of gimmick that somehow tries to compensate for the impossibility of the application running continuously in the background, when it would, for example, wake up every day at ten in the morning and remind you of the current holidays, but maybe I'm missing something?
OK, I'll answer it myself...I've been playing around with Occasions and I understand that it can be nice to not set anything at all and get notifications. I will consider how best to do this in one of the next versions of the Feast.
;-) Yeah yeah, Occasions is fine. Play around with it a bit, take a look at the benefits and then add it to Svatk...
I'm not very adept at using the various complexities. I don't know what to do so that my iphone or HOLIDAY Every morning they simply reminded me who has a holiday today, whether I have it saved or not.
Is it okay?
Thanks