Pillboxie for iPhone reminds you to pop your pills…in style!

I’ve been prescribed some pills lately and, given my chronic forgetfulness, have been looking for efficient ways to remind myself to stay on course. My quest led me to RxmindMe, a somewhat complicated but feature-rich app that I’ve been using for the task ever since.

In this article, we take a look at Pillboxie, an ordinarily $0.99 application for the iPhone that is free today. Although its goal is the same as that of RxmindMe, its priorities and approach to it is very different. Pillboxie truly is about style over substance, but depending on your requirement, that may not be such a bad thing.

Pillboxie is really well-designed. The app gets you up to speed on its features and usage when you first launch it through a short tutorial and then you are taken to your empty medicine cabinet. The other tabs in the app show you the medications that are scheduled for today that day and the settings to change the reminder tone.

When adding a medication, you get to enter its name, choose its appearance (colour and shape) and enter notes about it. It’s very basic information, just enough for you to be able to recognise the medication from the whole stack you may have between many family members.

To schedule a reminder, you drag the medicine into one of the pillboxes arranged in half-hour increments, creating as many reminders as you want in this manner. A Days button on the top-left corner of the screen allows you to set the app to remind you on a daily basis or on specific days of the week, depending on the course prescribed by your doctor. Once done, you will simply get a notification to take your meds according to the reminders you have set and they’ll keep coming until you manually turn them off.

However, for anything more complicated than what’s described above, it becomes more cumbersome. Unlike RxmindMe, which has custom schedules, inventory tracking and the ability to enter dosage information, Pillboxie works more like a generic reminder app than one focused on meds.

While they may be just what you may need—in which case Pillboxie is perfect for you—others will want to sacrifice Pillboxie’s looks for the utility of RxmindMe.

[Pillboxie is available for $0.99 on the App Store and is compatible with all iPhones running iOS 4.0 or later. It is not a universal app.]