I always have a problem with birthdays. I generally don't make a big deal about my own, and sometimes that leads me to forget my friends' big days. iCal helps me, and I have a few birthdays in there that have pop-ups a few days in advance. It works well, especially if I remember to make it a repeating alert from year to year.

Now, here's another solution that plays well with the iPhone or iPod touch. It's called Birthday Reminder [App Store link] and sells for $1.99US. It scours your contact list to pull birthday information, and shows you all the ones you have in a nice chronological list. You can also tap on anyone in the list and call or text them. It tells you when the birthday is coming up, and how old the person will be.

A couple of notes: First, I didn't know contacts even supported birthdays. You can add them on the iPhone or in the Mac app by selecting Add Field>Birthday. There are some other goodies in there too, like 'maiden name,' but that's a subject for another post.

After Birthday Reminder scans your contacts, you can set up the app to email you to jog your memory about upcoming birthdays. You can decide how many days in advance you want the warning, and you can also get sound effects with the notice, or not. You can't specify the time of day you get the warning; that's coming in version 1.1. As it is, they come at midnight, G.M.T.

At first, this app seemed a bit redundant, but as I used it I found it quite helpful and gave me a nice overview of birthdays I needed to worry about.

Here's some small nits... I don't think the GUI looks all that great. It is pretty plain, actually. I tried syncing the list to the developer's server for the email function. One day it worked fine. The next it kept crashing the app. You can't set multiple reminders. If you tell it to warn you 2 days in advance, that's all she wrote.

Birthday Reminder is a clever app. It's not life changing, but is certainly convenient to use. With a couple of the little bugs removed, and a few features added, I think it makes a nice, useful addition to your collection.

YABI, as we've mentioned before, fills the void left by iCal's lackluster Address Book import of birthdays by offering far more flexibility and power. YABI can create a custom calendar for birthdays and anniversaries, display a person's age in the event alarm title, select only specific contacts to import events for and - drum roll please - create alarms for these events. What's even better is that Ferruccio, YABI's developer, has updated this already handy little utility with some great new features:

• New, very updated Unified UI that brings YABI in line with Tiger and possibly Leopard
  
• A built-in self-updating mechanism thanks to Andy Mutaschak's Sparkle (on a side note: you're probably seeing a lot of 3rd party apps adopt this slick feature)
• Support for multiple alarms
• and more!

This is a great utility for anyone who, like me, needs a little more help than iCal provides with keeping track of the important dates in their lives. YABI seems to be freeware since I can't find any donation links at Ferruccio's site.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's iCal introduced a 'Show Birthdays calendar' option which automatically adds an all-day event for any contacts who have birthdays listed in Address Book. It's smart, but it isn't very flexible - there is no option for alarms and no way to add extra information like age or details of an impending party. Enter YABI: yet Another Birthday Importer, which aims to bring power and flexibility to the way iCal imports birthday events, as well as anniversaries (scroll down a little on the page). Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings has a nice writeup of key features, but to summarize, YABI can:

• display a person's age in the event title
• add events to the calendar of your choice
• set a configurable alarm
• chose exactly which contacts to import events for
• decide how many years to repeat the events
• and more

YABI strikes me as another one of those 'shoulda been in Tiger' apps, as it fills so many holes left by iCal's paltry implementation of this feature. Fortunately, it's a Universal Binary and free at least while in beta.