Miss the days of a beautiful personal assistant? Whether it is the momentous Money Penny from James Bond or the joyous Joan Harris from Madmen, every person wants a personable person to help them. Enter “Donna” the iPhone personal digital assistant. She integrates your location, destination and travel method to keep you on schedule.
Janel Maloney as Donna Moss in WestWing, the actual model for the Donna App-unobtrusive and indispensible. (Image Credit: Wikipedia)
Requirements
It requires permission to see your contacts and calendar and an email address with a password to setup. Once you are configured she looks up your appointments and then correlates the distances from location services to estimate your travel time based upon your preferred travel methods. Then, like magic, she reminds you of your appointments with ample travel time.
Donna’s Preferences
Please note beautiful interface in the pictures. Clean, spare and directly to the point. Furthermore she finds the address on her own! In the examples in our article we only entered the name of the destination in our iPhone calendar, no address, no fuss! Below you can see Donna even includes the Weather.
Locations
As you can see below you can set your default home and work locations in the app preferences, or, you can tap the screen and she’ll fetch directions for you.
Route and Destination
Donna allows for turn-by-turn directions at the top of the screen which swipe with a single finger. As you finger your way through the directions, the map below adjusts beautifully to your route.
Pros
Donna does one thing and she does it well. She reads your calendar, looks up events and reminds you with plenty of time to spare. You can also use Google Maps or Apple Maps. Although the latter have been roundly panned, I found them to be plenty successful in this use. In cities where available she also integrates with Uber, a taxi application, as well as with Public Transit. She even allows you to send an email or text to your invitees when running late!
Notifications
Cons
She does not integrate with Facebook or most of my other applications. Maybe I might want to tweet or Facebook the event. She also does not speak warnings, but that may be a feature to save battery life or to stay in her character as subtle.
Summary
Donna is an elegant personal digital assistant who successfully kept me on task and on time. She smoothly stays out of the way only intruding when necessary. Overall I recommend this to all manufacturers for their products. Expect this feature to be in all smart devices shortly. But best of all, she works for nothing! Because she is notification based, her battery footprint and impact are minimal. Download her from the USA AppStore for free.
*US ONLY
Please watch our video walkthrough
