Yearly is an iPhone app that pulls the birthday and anniversary information stored in your Contacts and displays them in a nice chronological list so you can keep track of which of these important dates are coming up next. When your friend’s birthday arrives, Yearly will send you a notification and you can quickly text, email, or call from within the app.

Since Apple’s built-in Contacts and Calendar apps support birthdays, you may be wondering the point of an app like Yearly. With the beautiful list that Yearly generates, it’s really easy to keep track of who’s birthday or anniversary is next in line and plan accordingly. You can also set it up to send you a notification 1-14 days before the events so that you are reminded if you want to buy a gift. Yearly has also implemented some nice gestures so that sending a Happy Birthday text is just a quick swipe away.

Tapping on a contact will bring you to a stripped down version of the info you’d find in the Contacts app. In nice big letters, Yearly tells you how old the person will turn on his or her next birthday and you’ll also find any notes you’ve stored for that contact, their phone number and email address. One piece of information that you find in Yearly but not Contacts is your friend’s zodiac sign.

Yearly may be duplicating some functionality of Apple’s built-in apps, but it’s focusing on a single function — keeping track of birthdays and anniversaries. The removal of unrelated information and the gorgeous UI is what makes Yearly a desirable app.

$0.99 – Download Now

Need a fast way to find out about birthdays? Not a problem. With the iPhone 4S you can avoid faking a distraction, jumping out the window, racing to the car, and slamming down on the accelerator, Homer Simpson-style, because you forgot that special someone’s special day. Assuming you have the birthday recorder in your calendar, all you have to do is ask Sir.

1. Hold down the Home button until Siri pops up
2. Ask Siri “When is [name's] birthday”
3. Wait for Siri to answer

Name’s can include your own (“my”), proper names (“Phil Nickinson’s”), or relationships (“my wife’s”), provided they’ve been added to the contact.

Now if only Siri would let us create Reminders based on birthdays, we may never be forced onto the couch again!

Thanks: Mia Nickinson

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Chris Breen of Macworld fame posted a handy tip on how to get birthdays for the 75+ among your family and friends to show up on the iPhone. (Seems the iPhone OS isn’t happy with events that repeat more than that many times, hence no birthday love for the seniors).

The solution is to create a separate repeating event in a different iCal calendar for your well-seasoned friends and family members that begins this year. Unless they live to be more than 150 years old, you should be set.

Check out his full post for details on managing birthdays on OS X in general, and syncing them over to iPhone.