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Posts tagged with "reminders"

Integrating OmniFocus and Reminders On OS X→

Integrating OmniFocus and Reminders On OS X

Daniel Jalkut and Sean Korzdorfer have been working on two aspects of the same problem: bridging the gap between OmniFocus and Reminders on OS X.

Sean put together a series of AppleScripts to send tasks from OmniFocus to Apple’s Reminders app for Mac. Daniel created (and open-sourced) an app to check Reminders for newly added items, transfer them to OmniFocus while keeping due dates, and deleting them from their original location in Reminders.

I love OmniFocus for both Mac and iOS, but it turns out that because I lean so heavily on using Siri to add items, I tend not to open OmniFocus while I’m on the go. When I come home and get to work on my Mac, I notice that OmniFocus doesn’t contain any of my recently added items, so I have to go through the cumbersome steps of opening my iPhone and launching OmniFocus just to get this theoretically time-saving trick to work right.

I have tried to get into using OmniFocus’ iCloud capture feature on iOS, but because I don’t use Siri on a daily basis, that didn’t turn into a habit. I know many rely on OmniFocus-Reminders integration, and I think these are nice solutions for the desktop.

I, however, have become a big fan of The Omni Group’s Mail Drop service. Using Drafts, I can write down a task, send it to Mail Drop, and have it in my OmniFocus inbox after a few minutes; if I want to save a link to a webpage, I can use a bookmarklet that sends a website to Drafts and then to Mail Drop. Rather than further integrating OmniFocus and Reminders, I’d like to open OmniFocus on iOS and find it already synced with all other copies of the app and Mail Drop. Right now developers have to resort to location-tricks to update information in the background, and I wish Apple will allow more background options in the future.

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Checkmark Review

When iOS 5 came out last year, I wrote about location support in Reminders:

One of Reminders’ key features is its location-based alert system. Thanks to Apple’s geo-fencing technology introduced in iOS 5 — and open for third-party developers to create apps with — the app can send you an alert when you’re about to “arrive at” or “leave” a particular place. This can be useful if you, say, want to be reminded of groceries when you arrive at the supermarket’s parking lot, or don’t want to forget about those documents when you’re leaving the office. There’s a caveat though: you can’t manually type an address as Apple chose to restrict this feature to a “contact location”. This means the address will have to be already attached to a contact in your Address Book, which can be inconvenient if you don’t want to keep the supermarket among your friends and family contacts. On the other hand, I assume Apple has done this for two reasons: saving users the time of typing addresses, and providing a familiar way to access often-used locations.

For the most part, Reminders works fine as a lightweight todo manager synced across devices and platforms. However, if you’re serious about location reminders and would like better control over how geofencing is triggered, Apple’s software won’t cut it. Because of Apple’s implementation – restricted to addresses associated with entries in your Address Book – iOS’ Reminders effectively forces you to create new contacts for places that you might need someday. So if you’re planning on setting up reminders for when you leave the grocery store, the office, the local coffee shop, or your friend’s house, you’re going to have to configure those in Address Book. Which, if you want to set up quick reminders for tasks that you won’t repeat on a daily basis, is a rather cumbersome process.

Furthermore, Apple’s Reminders isn’t the most streamlined application when it comes to the number of taps required to create a new item with due dates or alerts. Especially for location, in Reminders you’ll have to:

  • Create a new reminder and type;
  • Hit Return;
  • Select the reminder;
  • Tap “Remind Me”;
  • Select “On Location”;
  • Choose “When I Leave” or “When I Arrive”;
  • Tap “Location”;
  • Choose an address;
  • Go back and hit Done.

A 9-step process (10, if you want to pick an address from your Contacts) to create a reminder with attached location data. Can it be done better?

For the past month, I have been testing Checkmark, a highly-hyped and recommended new app developed by Snowman aimed at simplifying and speeding up the process of creating reminders on your iPhone. I found Checkmark to be a great replacement for Apple’s Reminders, and the kind of app that fits with my way of thinking, rather than forcing me to understand its rules and patterns.

Checkmark creates location and time-based reminders. It is a third-party app, so it won’t sync with the official Reminders app, nor will its reminders show up on the iPad or other devices (Checkmark is iPhone-only for now). When you open the app for the first time, you’re greeted with a first-launch tutorial that will teach you the basics: you can save favorite locations, view your current and completed items, or create a date/time based reminder if you don’t want to be reminded at a specific location. That’s it.

The main screen sports an intelligent design that trumps Apple’s design in terms of usability and speed. It is organized in two tabs – Where and When – that make it instantly clear which kind of items you can create, and how you can navigate between them.

The problem with Apple’s Reminders, as I outlined above, is that location is relegated to second class citizen spot inside the Address Book, rather than being displayed front and center in the app. Attaching location alerts to a reminder takes too many taps; a todo manager – no matter what kind of tasks it supports – should be fast, easy to use, and capable of receiving new items quickly. For this reason, the Checkmark developers organized the location screen as a grid of places: these are your favorite locations, they’re easy to tap on, and they are displayed through custom icons and names you can choose from a location’s settings.

Checkmark is smarter than Apple’s Reminders: when you add a new location, you can use your current location, add an address manually from the integrated map view, and only as a last option you can import a location from your contacts. In the map, you can drag and drop the pin to adjust the position, and choose a location radius to tweak the behavior of the geofence – should the app remind you when you’re 30 meters from home, or 250? These are functionalities that Apple’s software is still suspiciously lacking, even in the upcoming Mountain Lion (except for manual addresses, which Apple seems to have implemented in 10.8).

My favorite feature of Checkmark is its streamlined way of adding new location reminders. From the main “Where” screen, you can tap on a location to view all the reminders associated with it; tap the + button in the upper right corner, and create a new one with a title and (optional) notes. Set arrival or departure – depending on whether you want to be alerted when you arrive at a place, or leave it – and hit Save. Done. Unlike Apple’s app, it takes me 10 seconds to set up a new location reminder in Checkmark.

Checkmark also combines a timer functionality with geofencing. Say you want to be reminded about today’s meeting 30 minutes after you arrive at the office; or perhaps you want to be reminded about buying milk 15 minutes after you leave while you’re on your way home. In the Details screen of a location reminder, Checkmark lets you set a timer for 5 up to 60 minutes “after” you leave or arrive at a location.

Another nice touch of Checkmark is how the app calculates the distance from a location. Similarly, I am a fan of the custom sound alert the app uses for Notification Center; notifications (reminders, sound alerts, text alerts, and badge counts) can be configured in the app’s preferences inside Settings.app.

Being a utility that runs in the background all the time through Location Services, when I first installed Checkmark I was concerned the app would use too much battery. After weeks of testing, I can say that with the “normal” accuracy I haven’t noticed a substantial drop in battery life. This comes, however, at the cost of precision with location alerts, which sometimes went off a minute later than expected. By setting accuracy to “best”, precision got considerably better but I noticed the app was draining too much battery.

Checkmark isn’t just a prettier Reminders app, it is a better take on a concept that Apple first explored but somehow failed to properly implement on iOS. Checkmark won’t sync to your iPad or Mac, so here’s to hoping the new Event Kit framework for reminders in iOS 6 will allow its developers to turn Checkmark into a new interface and experience for iCloud reminders. Checkmark doesn’t work with Siri either, so if you rely on the voice assistant to quickly create reminders, you might want to reconsider your workflow and the importance of Apple’s Reminders before making a decision. However, right now, I find Checkmark to have powerful features for location and time-based reminders, and I highly recommend it.

Only $0.99 on the App Store.

Fantastical 1.3 Adds Reminders Integration

Flexibits’ Fantastical, a menubar-based calendar application to quickly enter new events with natural language recognition, has today been updated to include native integration with Reminders, a feature that Apple rolled out with its own app in iOS 5 last year. I have been testing the new Fantastical (version 1.3) for the past weeks, and its integration with calendars, reminders, and natural language input is as solid as ever.

One of Fantastical’s biggest advantages over similar apps to quickly add items to synced calendars is its built-in CalDAV engine, which ensures the app can directly communicate with online calendars without having to leave iCal open in the background. As with events, Fantastical 1.3 lets you create reminders with a few keystrokes, using reminder lists already configured in your calendar app of choice, such as iCal or Outlook. Because Fantastical is capable of directly communicating with the syncing engine behind Reminders – not just the calendar application that displays them on the desktop – you’ll be able to add reminders in Fantastical and have them synced across devices without leaving iCal open. In my tests, Fantastical 1.3 indeed took reminders I added from the menubar, and synced them to iCloud.com and other iOS devices within seconds. If iCal opens, as Flexibits explains in the FAQ, it’s because of a Lion default setting related to push; switching iCal’s refresh rate to 30 minutes doesn’t compromise Fantastical’s ability to create events and reminders independently of iCal.

Fantastical can create, edit, and delete reminders with natural language recognition. In testing the app, I told Fantastical to “remind me to take out the trash”, and the app intelligently parsed the command as just “take out the trash”, interpreting the initial portion of the sentence as a reminder input. Similarly, commands like “remind” and “todo” will trigger reminder creation in Fantastical 1.3, which, generally speaking, tries to associate every new item without a date to a reminder list. This, however, can be reverted at any time, as the interface to switch between reminders and events includes a handy switch to jump through both options.

Reminders can be given a specific date or priority, assigned a note, but they don’t support location and time-based alerts, as those features are exclusive to iOS’s Reminders and Siri. In the app’s UI, reminders are displayed alongside calendar events, and they use the same floating popover windows for modifications.

In testing Fantastical 1.3 with my iCloud calendar and reminders, I found the app to be remarkably fast and reliable. As you would expect from Fantastical, adding new reminders takes seconds thanks to keyboard navigation and shortcuts, and the syncing engine didn’t miss a beat when communicating with iCloud and iOS. Unsurprisingly considering previous versions of the app, the parser doesn’t disappoint when it comes to automatically switching between event and reminder creation (try to add a date to a reminder, and check out the animation).

Fantastical 1.3 is a great update if you’ve been looking forward to Reminders integration, and another solid release for an app we’ve previously recommended. Fantastical is $19.99 on the App Store.

QuickCal 3.1 Released with Improved Recognition Engine, iCloud Reminders, Autocomplete Feature

I love the start of a new year because it is a great time to revamp your productivity workflow. You can re-evaluate what tools you use and even buy new apps completely free of guilt. It is no secret that the cornerstone of any good system is the calendar but it can be difficult to force yourself to create calendar events on a regular basis. Well, the folks behind QuickCal have just released a great update to get you back in the routine of managing your calendar.

One major improvement in QuickCal 3.1 is the re-written recognition engine that the app uses to understand natural language input. QuickCal has no structured syntax for adding events and reminders which actually makes adding items extremely flexible. When typing in the event you no longer have to start with the event title, you actually have the option of starting with a time, duration, location, or title and QuickCal will almost always get it right. I have also noticed a dramatic improvement in QuickCal’s ability to correctly parse out event locations which is something I have had trouble with in previous versions. Regardless of the order in which you type out the information, QuickCal does an excellent job figuring out the details for you. Adding events to your calendar without worrying about correct syntax is incredibly powerful. The only way QuickCal could get any faster at creating calendar events is if it actually finished sentences for you.

oh, wait…

Have I mentioned their new autocomplete feature? Autocomplete does exactly what you expect it to do. As you are typing common words, QuickCal gives you suggestions of words it thinks you might be typing. To accept the autocompletion you can just hit the tab key and continue on typing. It will even pickup on your most frequently used words and auto-suggest them in the future. After only 3 or 4 reminders relating to my wife Leslie, QuickCal was finishing her name for me. It is awesome. In fact, I am finding it so useful that I am not sure how I had ever used QuickCal without this feature.

Perhaps the greatest improvement to QuickCal is its integration with iCloud Reminders. A reminder is now added to your default Reminders list and shows up in the iOS 5 Reminders app. If the reminder has a date or time then an alarm is also created. This alone is a neat feature but it wasn’t enough to pry me away from the Alfred extension I had created to quickly add simple iOS 5 Reminders. Although as I continued to use the new version of QuickCal, I realized that I could also add items to other lists by simply typing the name of the list. For example, my wife and I share a Groceries list. If I just start typing Gro… it suggests switching to my Groceries list so I can add an item to it. In true QuickCal fashion it does so very intuitively and without effort. It is a great feature that truly increases my dependency on QuickCal. The only drawback is still having to open iCal to trigger an iCloud sync. When CalDAV is supported and I no longer need that extra step, QuickCal will be my ideal iCal replacement.

Check out QuickCal 3.1 and all of its new features on the Mac App Store.

OmniFocus for iPhone Adds “iCloud Capture” To Import iOS Reminders

With the latest update to OmniFocus for iPhone, The Omni Group has figured out a way to let the app interact with iOS reminders and iCloud, and automatically fetch reminders created through the iPhone 4S’ Siri or Reminders app. Whilst you still can’t ask Siri to create new tasks directly into OmniFocus, the solution implemented by The Omni Group is very clever, and it gives you the illusion of native integration with the assistant, using iCloud and your Apple ID as a bridge between Siri’s reminder functionality, and OmniFocus.

The Omni Group has implemented a new feature called iCloud Capture that is capable of taking Reminders from your iCloud account, and move them into OmniFocus’ inbox. iCloud Capture, as explained in the Help section, literally takes input that would otherwise stay into Reminders, and moves “as much data as it can” away from Reminders and into OmniFocus. This is done in two ways: first, you have to create reminders that go into a “Reminders” or “OmniFocus” list. Second, you’ll have to log in with your iCloud account in OmniFocus’ settings, and enable iCloud Capture. Once enabled, OmniFocus will check for new reminders every time upon launch and move them into the inbox. The “upon launch” part is important, as OmniFocus can’t process iCloud data in the background – you won’t be able to add reminders via Siri, and expect OmniFocus to import & sync in the background. You’ll have to open OmniFocus for iCloud Capture to work, but it’s a minimal effort compared to the added convenience of being able to let OmniFocus seamlessly process and import reminders.

Please note that reminders will be deleted from Reminders.app as they’re moved to OmniFocus; title and dates will be preserved in the transition, but The Omni Group says that location reminders – which both Siri and Apple’s Reminders can use out of the box – will be “most effective” when they match Reminders’ contact locations and OmniFocus’ own implementation, which is quite different from Apple as it’s got more options. From my understanding of this limitation, it appears getting location reminders into OmniFocus from iCloud might work best if OmniFocus is using the same contact information rather than its “current location” or “exact location”, and I’ll need to investigate this further. For now, I can say that one location-based reminder did go through iCloud Capture, but another did not, and stayed inside Reminders.

The Omni Group didn’t add direct Siri integration, but they came up with one of the most clever ways I’ve seen to use Siri and iCloud to create reminders and have them automatically moved to OmniFocus every time you open the app. The system isn’t perfect, but has worked very well for me with simple reminders. Another good point of iCloud Capture is that Windows users will be able to move Outlook tasks to OmniFocus when they launch the app, as iCloud Capture checks for all reminders in your iCloud account, not just those created via Siri. Overall, I’d recommend giving iCloud Capture a try, and see if reminders might work better for you inside OmniFocus rather than Apple’s Reminders.

Update: The Omni Group has posted a series of videos showing how iCloud Capture works. Check them out after the break.

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iOS 5 Reminders From an OmniFocus User’s Perspective

When I first got my hands on the new Reminders app in iOS 5, I launched it and scoffed under my breath. Sure it was cute but it was not for me. I have spent so much time developing a bond with OmniFocus that I don’t know if it could ever be broken. It probably sounds dramatic but OmniFocus and I have been through some hard times together, probably some of the worst in my life.

My wife hates when she sees OmniFocus projects related to something personal in our marriage but it is my trusted system and I use it for everything. I have never found a suite of applications that can do for me what OmniFocus does. I have tried so many productivity and task management apps that I refuse to count them for fear of realizing the amount of money I have wasted. I have a natural (or unnatural if you ask my wife) attraction to this genre of apps so of course I was excited to take a look at the new Reminders app.

Reminders is a simple, albeit extremely well done, list-making application. Its main appeal is the “geo-fencing” feature that will trigger a reminder based on your proximity to a predefined location. The concept is amazing to me. The only problem is Reminders does not easily integrate in to my existing system, thus I probably won’t be able to truly utilize it.

Enter Siri. Read more

iOS 5: Reminders

 

With iOS 5, Apple has decided to tackle the to-do and reminder app market by offering its own solution that’s tightly integrated with iCloud, calendars, and Address Book. Reminders, a new system app in iOS 5, allows users to easily and quickly jot down their to-dos and organize them in “lists” that are stored and backed up to the cloud in real-time. Reminders are constantly pushed across devices and the web on iCloud.com, and they come with a series of options to give them date-based alarms, a location, or notes.

Reminders is a straightforward app that can’t be compared to more complex to-do and project management solutions like OmniFocus or Things, but it doesn’t need to achieve or aspire to such complexity as it’s a utility aimed at making it extremely simple to quickly create a reminder, and forget about the existence of the app itself. You won’t spend time “tweaking” or “customizing” Reminders; you can’t assign “tags” to to-dos and move them around between folders. The app has got a single theme (as per Apple’s recent skeuomorphic trends, the app resembles an old leather-bound agenda with the heavy use of textures) and two functionalities besides reminder creation: lists and search. Read more

OmniFocus Updated with iOS 5 Location Reminders

The Omni Group released two updates for its OmniFocus app for iPhone and iPad today, adding several bug fixes and improvements, iOS 5 compatibility, and a new Location Reminders feature that leverages iOS 5’s geo-fencing APIs to send you a reminder when you’re in the right area to complete an action. The same technology is used by Apple in Reminders, a new native app in iOS 5.

The new Location Reminders in OmniFocus require an iPhone 4 or iPad 2 3G with iOS 5 installed. iOS 5 isn’t coming out until Wednesday, October 12th, but I’ve been able to test the functionality on my iPhone 4 running the Golden Master release of iOS 5. In the new OmniFocus, location needs to be assigned to a Context from the context editing view. The location settings have more options than Apple’s Reminders app – you can assign a location to a context by fetching the current location via GPS, selecting a contact’s address (like Reminders), or pinpointing your exact location. You can also manually search for an address, select “always available”, or choose to skip location altogether by choosing “none”. Once you’ve set a location for a context, you can select how you should be notified for an available task: when you leave or when you arrive. In this screen, The Omni Group warns that Apple’s geo-fencing technology in the first version of iOS 5 has a series of limitations to keep in mind – opening the app’s Help screen reveals that location-based reminders might not be 100% accurate, especially if you quickly leave/re-enter a location, or quickly pass by one (example: while driving on the highway). This is something The Omni Group can’t really address on its own as it’s a set of APIs provided by Apple, and if anything it shows that the developers are committed to providing an optimal experience by offering even more location options than Apple’s Reminders. In my tests, I can confirm OmniFocus’ (and Reminders, too) location alerts haven’t been accurate all the time – current location would work with a specified area, but not a manually-entered address. Similarly, the distance settings offered by OmniFocus sometimes failed in reminding me to do something when I was leaving a location; the app offers three different dots to determine distance, a small one for about 200 meters (600 feet), a middle-sized circle for 500 meters (1500 feet) and a big circle for 10 kilometers (6 miles). Again, these are options that Apple doesn’t provide in its native Reminders app.

It’s too bad location technology for reminders in iOS 5 still needs some optimizations, because I believe OmniFocus’ support for the feature is just great. The user interface is simple and elegant, the context-based system is meaningful to the concept of context itself, and OmniFocus is still a fantastic piece of software (with several bug fixes that you can check out in iTunes’ changelog). There’s no doubt Apple will improve location reminders over time, and please note, too, that there’s a chance the functionality will work perfectly for you, and addresses in my area simply don’t want to cooperate with Apple and OmniFocus.

You can get the updated OmniFocus in the App Store here (iPhone) and here (iPad).

Notificant Now Delivers Beautiful Reminders Across iPhone, Mac and Web

Released back in January on the Mac a few days after the Mac App Store grand opening, Notificant for Mac was a pretty sweet way to create reminders and timed notifications on the desktop, and have them always available thanks to the web app counterpart developers Caramel Cloud built. As the name of the company suggests, Notificant is a heavily cloud-oriented product: the Mac app is simple and unobtrusive in the way it lives in the menubar, but it leverages the power of the cloud and client sync to fire off notifications across computers and web browsers with incredible reliability and speed. And today, with the release of Notificant for iPhone, Caramel Cloud wants to extend the capabilities of the platform to the iPhone, delivering notifications anywhere, at any time.

Notificant for iPhone follows the path traced by the Mac and web apps, offering users a clean and elegant interface to create and manage upcoming notifications. Once you log in with your Caramel Cloud account, you’ll be able to choose a custom sound effect in the settings, as well as decide to show an icon badge on the homescreen. The main screen is organized in two tabs: Archive lets you access past reminders and re-schedule them if you want to create a new notification off an old one, whilst the Upcoming tab lists all the notifications that you set and are about to fire off across the cloud to your registered computers and mobile devices. To add a new notification, you have to tap on the + button in the upper right corner. In this new screen, two other tabs allow you to set a delivery date and time; the text entry box at the top lets you write down details of your reminder, as well as shorten any link you’ve inserted. Similarly to Twitter, Notificant’s reminders have a limit of 160 characters (Twitter’s limit is 140). In my tests, I’ve found Notificant’s reminders created on the iPhone to be as reliable and precise as those added on the Mac and web app – which is great, as it means the system put in place by the developers is working correctly and doing its job throughout the cloud. A welcome addition to the iPhone app would be a refresh button in the main page to quickly remove notifications and check for new ones – of course, it’d also be great to have a native iPad app in the future. I’m sure Caramel Cloud is considering the option.

Notificant for iPhone makes reminders simple, and available anywhere. It’s simple, well-designed, and focused on one feature: enabling you to be notified of the things you care about. Get the app here. Read more