Atomic Review: Hippo

[read_meter]

Hippo is another app built by a single developer.

Born out of his own need to remember details about his contacts and struggling to succeed by memory (I feel the pain). Hippo is very simple and mostly relies on manual input, but it seems to do a decent job tracking contacts, notes about them, events related to them, and even reminders.

Reminders are not, like in other apps in this space, there to remind you to get in touch, but instead to remember what you wanted to discuss or ask during your next conversation with a person.

Links

• Developer: gethippo.app

Evaluation

• Design

It’s simple but effective on iPhone and iPad.

A bit too colorful for my taste, but that’s very personal. The biggest caveat is that the macOS app is the iPad app now running on macOS but not designed for a large screen. One usability issue that confused me was placing the Settings button at the bottom of the events list.

Once I populated the list, it became hard to locate.

• Performance

I only added a dozen contacts, so hard to evaluate. Contact addition, though, is manual, even the import from the phone contacts requires manually selecting them, so I wasn’t going to import hundreds.

• Platforms

iOS only at the moment. That is a bit limited.

• Integrations

Contacts and Calendars on iOS. It can import contacts from the former and read events from the latter. Unfortunately, events come in quite messy, with HTML code not interpreted everywhere in my experience.

• Flexibility

I don’t think Hippo is built with flexibility in mind. I respect the choice, although it’s too limited for me.

• Cost

Free for one month, then $2/month or $15/year.

Conclusion

Probably the smallest set of features of this series of tests.

It’s not what I am looking for now, but I have the utmost respect for very focused apps doing only a thing or two well.