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Comment by awestley | Hacker News Reader

Many apps lack a good means of triggering "reminders" on iOS and MacOs. Apple seems to keep the secret sauce to themselves. 3rd party apps just miss the mark IMO. However, the reminders app itself leave a lot to be desired. So something like this that ties a great app into what the native apps reminders is a great idea. Thank you for sharing!

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What features is the Reminders app missing? I switched from Things to Reminders and didn't notice any missing features. Not doubting your statement - I'm genuinely curious to know what functionality might be lacking in Reminders that I'm unaware of.

Persistent reminders. TickTick's implementation is good.

what is a persistent reminder?

It keeps spamming notifications until you act on it. Very helpful if you need some help with attention.

I use the IOS "Due" app for this. I have it set-up to pull out items from Reminders that have days and times assigned.

Makes it really hard to forget those tasks.

I have used that, it's pretty nice! For now I settled on TickTick cause it's easy to use from my Linux laptop and my iOS devices. If you are fully Apple, Due is a good choice.

Also, Due syncs via iCloud, which can be e2e encrypted nowadays.

With TickTick you're storing / sharing your data with a commercial company...

I certainly see the notifications for incomplete tasks from Reminders on my lock screen every time I lift my iPhone. I have one I've been ignoring for weeks. Seems pretty persistent to me...

> Many apps lack a good means of triggering "reminders" on iOS and MacOs. Apple seems to keep the secret sauce to themselves.

Apple built developers an entire framework dedicated to this, which works on both iOS and macOS. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/eventkit

I run my own CardSAV/CalDAV server but as long as you have a DAV server (Fastmail gives one for eg), Reminders will happily sync against it.

I use it to sync my reminders/contacts/calendars across Thunderbird/Linux and iOS.

I can edit/update/delete items programmatically with ease without any Apple secret sauce.

That sound like a fun project to try out. I may try that out. Thanks.

This is probably one of the best yet most underrated features of the various stock Apple organizational apps: they work just as well as vendor agnostic clients for standard protocols (IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, etc) with relatively little favoring of first-party services.

I wish this were more common, but instead it’s more typical to see things like the vendor agnostic Windows Mail being abandoned for “new” Outlook which is much pushier about using MS services.

Shortcuts app has just enough support to manage reminders, but automation triggers are fairly limited.

I haven't had great luck with shortcut reminders. I always feel like there are cases it didn't trigger, then I don't trust it.

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