For the last few weeks I’ve been beta-testing my friend John Eddie’s iPhone app, Years. It’s now been released. I recommend it.

Years quickly became the iPhone app I use most frequently. I hadn’t realized how often I simply want to look at a year’s calendar. Not a month, not a week, not a bunch of detail about appointments, but just the current year, scrolled so today is in the middle.

That’s exactly what Years does. It defaults to the current year, and allows you to view other years. There’s a month view where you can scribble on a date to mark it.

Years points up the problem with most calendar apps: they do too much. There’s no end of enhancements you can add to a calendar: appointments, alarms, view as list, and so on. Those are useful features and I’m grateful that Calendar provides them.

The brilliance of Years is its restraint: it recognizes that most of the time, I just want to look at a calendar. Apple’s Calendar app displays at most one month at a time, so I frequently have to flip between months. It’s not really a calendar, but rather an appointment book.

Years reminds us that some useful things work best when they remain simple. How many weeks until Christmas? What day of the month was last Friday? How many days until we leave on our trip? That’s the sort of question I ask every day, and the answers have never been as easy to find. With Years, there’s no punching around to get the correct month and layout. It just pops up the calendar I want.

I wonder how I got along without it.