Elephant Memory

You can’t rely on your brain to remember everything you have to do, and it’s not even fair to blame it for this. Given the amount of things that need to be done, and the little time at your disposal, you might as well use applications like Elephant Memory to keep track of activities, and set up reminders for events.

The application spends most of its time hidden in the system tray, and it also starts there, with no tooltip or prompt to inform you of this. In any case, interacting with the corresponding icon brings up a small configuration window, which is pretty easy to grasp by individuals of all levels of experience.

An initially empty list is where all items you create are shown, along with info like name and time to sound the alarm. Adding a new alarm doesn’t take more than a few seconds. This is because all you have to do is write in a name for the new thing you want to be reminded of, as well as the timer, while pressing the Add button makes it active, and shows it on the list.

There are two methods through which Elephant Memory manages time. The first can be set so the alarm starts in a given amount of hours or minutes. The other is configured with date and time input values, and one task can hold only one of the two types.

When you’re done, you can minimize the application to system tray. Whenever time runs out for a specific task, a small window shows up, with options to either dismiss, or snooze. Unfortunately, all of them are brought up at the same time, the the alert only consists of the small prompt, with no option to pick a sound file.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Elephant Memory comes with good intentions, but isn’t quite the choice to use on the long run. Sure enough, items are easily created, with two options to set trigger time, but poor implementation of features can make you risk appointments, with all alerts showing up at the same time.