Jubilee is an iPad application with a very narrow focus: it aims to help you remember birthdays and send electronic birthday cards. No more, no less. It’s wrapped up in a lovely interface, and makes the whole process of congratulating someone on their birthday a really fun process.

If you regularly find yourself sending a “belated” birthday card to your own family members, it’s definitely worth reading on to find out more!

Mark Your Calendar

Jubilee’s main view is an attractive-looking monthly calendar with a sidebar indicating upcoming birthdays. The calendar shows a contact image for each day with a birthday on it, which can be good—if you’ve got attractive friends—or bad if, like me, you’ve made the mistake of using a piece of software that pulls contact images from Facebook.

Birthday Calendar

Tapping one of those contact images or upcoming birthdays will get you a detail screen from which you can add notes, edit your contact’s information, or send a greeting card.

Birthday Detail

You can also set up push notifications in the Settings view, which you reach by pressing the information button in the lower left hand corner. Once set up, you’ll receive email reminders when someone’s birthday arrives.

Send a Card

When you tap “Send Greeting Card”, you’re presented with a set of twelve templates to choose from. They’re all attractive, if a bit generic, and present a diverse range of options in terms of sentiment.

Card Templates

My only real complaint is that the templates are limited by the range of fonts installed by default on the iPad; as far as I can tell, the developers didn’t license any additional fonts, which means an awful lot of Marker Felt and inappropriate serifs.

An Example Card

You can enter whatever text you like into a pair of preset text boxes—no moving them around, though. You can also add a signature, which can be reused for future cards.

Add Your Signature

Once you’re happy with the card you’ve created—you can preview it to make sure it looks the way you want it to—you can email it using the standard iPad email popup. The app will tag a “Sent with jubileeapp.com” image onto your message by default, but you can easily delete it if you’d rather your girlfriend think you remembered her birthday and designed an electronic birthday card all on your own.

Sending via Email

A Simple Gift

Jubilee is a simple app (from the user’s standpoint, anyway), that does very few things but does them well. Aside from the font complaint I mentioned earlier, I found only two issues with Jubilee.

First, it uses your address book to put birthdays on the calendar. If you maintain a separate birthday calendar instead, or keep birthdays on your personal calendar, Jubilee won’t know about them. That shouldn’t be an issue for most people, but it’s something to be aware of.

Second, if you’re hoping to dash off a very simple card without thinking about a message, think again—you can’t send a card with fewer than ten characters in the main message text box. In other words, the developers expect you to put a little bit of thought and effort into your birthday cards. I suppose it’s only fair—they clearly have.

Jubilee’s main competition is a ninety-nine-cent app called Birthday Reminders for both iPad and iPhone (Jubilee only supports the iPad). It is my very strong opinion that it’s worth the extra three dollars for Jubilee to avoid the desire to put out my own eyes that Birthday Reminders instills in me.

That said, if you’re looking for a rock-bottom price and don’t mind struggling through a clunky interface, Birthday Reminders… well… it exists. It doesn’t, however, allow you to send attractive electronic cards—another feature to figure into the price difference.

If you need an attractive way to remember birthdays and send electronic birthday cards, definitely give Jubilee a try. It’s $3.99 on the App Store, and well worth it for chronic birthday-forgetters.