Birthdays Diary, a free birthdays reminder app

[lemonez]

This is a discussion thread for Birthdays Diary, one of my Windows Phone apps. I hope you'll like it.

Screenshots:

Demo video: here

Official Facebook Page: here

Description:
Birthdays Diary is a great free app for browsing and managing your friends' birthdays.

You can easily see birthdays coming soon or find the birthday of a particular friend.

Birthdays Diary features a nice, customizable live tile, allowing you to peek at coming birthdays from your home screen.

Other features include:

• browse birthdays by month, week or day
• see additional data, like age and zodiac sign
• hide birthdays you are not interested in
• greet your friends from within the app
• Facebook integration

User reactions.
Currently the app reads birthdays from Facebook and from the phone. It is not possible to add custom birthdays in the app. This will be available in the next version.

Version history:

Version 1.1
[Improved] User interface improvements
[Fixed] Birthdays displayed one day earlier in certain time zones

Discussions.
I welcome any feature requests, bug reports or just random thoughts.


Thank you and take care.

Free download:

 

[moc426]

This is a great app. Will be even better when you can add birthdays. I just wanted to report that I am trying to post to facebook from it and it just sits on creating wall post.

Thanks for the great app.

 

[lemonez]

This is a great app. Will be even better when you can add birthdays. I just wanted to report that I am trying to post to facebook from it and it just sits on creating wall post.

Thanks for the great app.

Hi moc426,

Thank you very much for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

Adding birthdays (and other anniversaries) is already done and will be included in the next version. And the next version should be available in a week or so.

I found out the same bug you mentioned and I am now working to fix it.

 

[Squatting Hen]

I look forward to the next version as I don't use Facebook. Thanks.

 

[Netro1]

looks like a nice app... installing
thank you!

 

[TMavC5]

looks like a nice app... installing
thank you!

Trying it now.

 

[lemonez]

New version released!

The next version of Birthdays Diary is now available in the marketplace! I hope you'll like it! You can download it from here.

The update adds several new features and also fixes some known issues. Here is the complete changelog:

Version 1.2 changes
[New] Ability to add custom anniversaries
[New] Ability to show days left in live tile
[New] Compatibility with low-memory devices
[Improved] Birth date is now visible in search
[Improved] Advertizing menu icon is now showing much more rarely
[Improved] Default live tile settings adjusted
[Fixed] Facebook synchronization problems
[Fixed] Posting on friend's wall did succeed but progress was not hiding
[Fixed] Age was sometimes not showing in live tile even if turned on
[Fixed] "Show zero count" setting for live tile not working for "Single birthday" mode

 

[mworsham]

The next version of Birthdays Diary is now available in the marketplace! I hope you'll like it! You can download it from here.

The update adds several new features and also fixes some known issues. Here is the complete changelog:

Version 1.2 changes
[New] Ability to add custom anniversaries
[New] Ability to show days left in live tile
[New] Compatibility with low-memory devices
[Improved] Birth date is now visible in search
[Improved] Advertizing menu icon is now showing much more rarely
[Improved] Default live tile settings adjusted
[Fixed] Facebook synchronization problems
[Fixed] Posting on friend's wall did succeed but progress was not hiding
[Fixed] Age was sometimes not showing in live tile even if turned on
[Fixed] "Show zero count" setting for live tile not working for "Single birthday" mode

I'm noticing that birthdays that I have in Exchange are being displayed one day late; today is Mikel's birthday, and his birth date is correct in my Exchange account, but Birthdays Diary is saying that his birthday is tomorrow. I have the exact same scenario next week with another friend; her birthday is June 3 (and is correct in Exchange) but Birthdays Diary is showing her birthday is June 4.

 

[lemonez]

I'm noticing that birthdays that I have in Exchange are being displayed one day late; today is Mikel's birthday, and his birth date is correct in my Exchange account, but Birthdays Diary is saying that his birthday is tomorrow. I have the exact same scenario next week with another friend; her birthday is June 3 (and is correct in Exchange) but Birthdays Diary is showing her birthday is June 4.

Hello mworsham,

Thank you for reporting this. I believe this is related to a bug in Windows Phone(or Exchange, or Windows Live). You can see more information here:
Calendar birthday events are offset by 1 day if they fall in the daylight saving period

It may or may not be exactly the same issue, but the actual problem is that birthdays for your phone contacts are stored not as date-only, but as date+time. Due to daylight saving and timezone settings a birthday might sometimes be synchronized wrongly. I tested it with a birthday which was displayed on a wrong date and noticed that Windows Phone just gives me a wrong date. For example, instead of "Jul 4 2012, 00:00:00" it gives "July 3 2012, 23:00:00" e.g. one hour earlier, which falls on the previous day.

I did my best to fix it in version 1.1 but it is not possible to fix all cases, because Windows Phone just provides a wrong date. I do some guessing based on the time zone offset and this makes most of the dates correct, but not all. Since the fix, you are the only one reporting this issue, so I believe it is fixed in most of the cases. However, as I wrote, it depends on region and timezone settings so there might be some cases that are not covered.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can do anything to fix this better. You should note that such problem does not exist for birthdays from Facebook.

 

[mworsham]

Hello mworsham,

Thank you for reporting this. I believe this is related to a bug in Windows Phone(or Exchange, or Windows Live). You can see more information here:
Calendar birthday events are offset by 1 day if they fall in the daylight saving period

It may or may not be exactly the same issue, but the actual problem is that birthdays for your phone contacts are stored not as date-only, but as date+time. Due to daylight saving and timezone settings a birthday might sometimes be synchronized wrongly. I tested it with a birthday which was displayed on a wrong date and noticed that Windows Phone just gives me a wrong date. For example, instead of "Jul 4 2012, 00:00:00" it gives "July 3 2012, 23:00:00" e.g. one hour earlier, which falls on the previous day.

I did my best to fix it in version 1.1 but it is not possible to fix all cases, because Windows Phone just provides a wrong date. I do some guessing based on the time zone offset and this makes most of the dates correct, but not all. Since the fix, you are the only one reporting this issue, so I believe it is fixed in most of the cases. However, as I wrote, it depends on region and timezone settings so there might be some cases that are not covered.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can do anything to fix this better. You should note that such problem does not exist for birthdays from Facebook.

Thank you for the explanation, and yes, I have noticed that Facebook birthdays are OK. It's a beautifully done app and I will keep using it, just noticed that issue a few days ago.

 

[lemonez]

Updated!

Hello everyone,

Version 1.3 is now available worldwide. It is mostly a bugfix release, here are the changes:

[New] Introduced a setting to disable category-based background color for the live tile
[Improved] Spell check is now enabled for Name and Description fields (when adding custom anniversary)
[Fixed] Minor Facebook integration issues were fixed
[Fixed] "Single birthday" mode for the live tile now works correctly

Another update is coming soon, it will include support for three new languages: Portuguese(Portugal), Portuguese(Brazil) and Dutch.

I would appreciate your help with translating the app to other languages as well. If you want to help, just let me know and I will send you the files. It should take no more than 2-3 hours if you are fluent with the language.

Thank you, I hope you like the new version.

 

[lemonez]

Paid version released

A paid, ad-free version of Birthdays Diary is now available. You can get it from here: https://forums.windowscentral.com/e...hdays%2F9nblggh08t99%3Frtc%3D1&token=xDufSeFA

The paid version is exactly the same as the free version, except it does not show ads at the bottom of the screen.

Please note, that the paid version uses different storage than the free version. This means you will lose any settings or custom anniversaries you have entered. This is a limitation of Windows Phone, one app cannot access the storage of another. I am planning to introduce SkyDrive integration and the ability to back up and synchronize data there, but this is not yet available.

 

[lemonez]

Version 1.4 released

Hi everyone,

I would like to announce that version 1.4 is now available!

The most significant in it is the support for four new languages: Dutch, Czech, Portuguese (Portugal) and Portuguese (Brazil).

Here is the full list of changes:
[New] Four new languages are now available: Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch and Czech
[Improved] Live tile: if contact picture is unavailable, contact name is always displayed
[Fixed] The app was crashing sometimes when selecting main or related contact for custom anniversary
[Fixed] Filtering by category was not working properly

 

[Bernd Vantyghem]

Great app. I have one issue. Not all my contacts are in Facebook. So I selected the Facebook sync and the contactpersons sync. I have duplicates on the birthday calendar when a person is a Facebook friend and when he is in the contactpersons. Is there a way to just show that person once in the calender?

 

[lemonez]

Hello Berndt,

I am glad to hear that you like the app!

The problem is that we cannot know if you have the same contact twice. Even if you link the contacts in your phone, we do not have access to that information. One thing we could do is check if the name is exactly the same. This is doable, but having exactly the same name in your phone book as the person's Facebook account is very rare.

To offer some workaround the app allows you to hide certain birthdays. Just tap one of the duplicate birthdays and select "hide" from the menu. This will make it disappear from the list and from the live tile. Later, you can see all hidden birthdays from the main menu, in case you want to unhide some.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have other questions.

 

[Abhay Kudwa]

Amazing app and very very useful.. Downloading now :smile:

 

[Remus Vintan]

Recently, my Lumia 820 was broken and I can't turn it on. Because of budget limits, I bought a Lumia 640 LTE (it's my third Lumia and I want more )

But the new phone doesn't recognize my apps that I had installed on microSD used on L820.

How can I recover my Birthdays data? I found a folder named "WPSystem" having a subfolder "AppData" in my card. Also I found the "CustomAnniversaries" and its xmls. But I can't read data from it, it seems to be encrypted

Any advice would be great. Thank you.

 

[mariuzzs]

Very good idea. Well done!