Have you ever gotten a ticket because you forgot to refill the parking meter? Sucks doesn’t it? Here’s the deal: you can pay a monkey to keep popping quarters in the slots, or you can pay for an iPhone app that’s honk worthy. Really: parking meters (and remembering your parking spot) shouldn’t be so hard.

Nothing gets you out the door faster than a friendly beep when you’re dilly-dallying with relatives: think of Honk as your significant other reminding you to hurry up and get to the car. As you set the app’s parking meter with a quick swipe, it counts down and reminds you at regular intervals that you have money burning out there. It’s not just any money burning after all: parking meters are practically life and death when it comes to parking fines. Unfortunately the honks are a little annoying (okay, they bugged the hell out of me), but they definitely DO get your attention. I can’t guarantee that the lady at the counter won’t look at you weird, but I can guarantee that it’s panic inducing when you hear it for the first time.

Your iPhone takes care of the parking meter time, but what about remembering where you actually parked? This is a problem for many with with park-it-and-forget-it syndrome, and it’d be a terrible thing to get lost in San Fran as the seconds are counting. Fortunately you can use Honk’s built in GPS (which you can also set manually – awesome) to keep track of your car on Google Maps. But if you have an iPod touch like I do, a sketchpad is included so you can quickly draw out your surroundings on a whiteboard or a picture (also AWESOME). I’m not a fan of the alarms, but these map and sketch features alone refilled my like-meter: they definitely made the app for me.

For a dollar in the App Store, you may save yourself $50 or more in parking fines. You may even become the family hero as you can finally remember where you parked. Honk away my fellow MacStories readers and parking meters beware!