Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sir_Twist | Hacker News Reader

Not a developer, but I feel like Apple improving the defaults has been good for the ecosystem. The Reminders app is an example of this, because as it has gotten better over the years, the baseline for a good iOS to-do app has been raised, without reducing the market.

View on HN

I agree 100%. I ended up building myself a utility to wrangle my reminders (like keep them from getting missed/lost) instead of using a third-party app.

Can you describe that utility?

Nice try, Claude Code

Is that meant to be a joke? I've been on HN for over a decade. Closer to ELIZA's era than that of LLMs.

I'm curious because I'm also interested in hacking the Reminders app via its API, to add some features in a side app

If you try it out, I'm curious what you'd add! I'd be happy to make improvements.

One thing I miss from the Newton was the universal design it had for accessing app data and extending apps that made such add-ons to the built-in apps relatively easy.

EventKit is surprisingly good.

Oh 100% a joke, that you were trying to get their prompt so you could get also get the same thing they had vibe-coded

Yeah! I mean I published it on the app store, too. It does three core things: 1) Makes sure every reminder gets a date and time if it doesn't have one 2) Snowplows them ahead of you, so if you go on vacation they're still in the near future 3) Moves reminders out of the way if you accept or create a calendar event conflicting with it

It also preserves ordering when moving things (hence my snowplow approach).

Soon it'll summarize what you did that day so you can feel good about what you get done - that's coming shortly, I'm testing the feature for another few days.

There are a bunch of settings to tweak this - picking what reminder lists to include, setting a time window for when it'll reschedule things, etc.

This should link to it:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reminder-wrangler/id6759400510

One issue is: when the Reminders app was simple, making a better reminders app just had to be a little more complex that a single developer could improve upon it and charge for it once and make a living. Now, the bar is so high, that it takes significantly more work/time to make a better app, and thus we have to pay subscription pricing in order to use it.

Instead of: let me buy this app for a few bucks and give it a spin, its now: even if I like this app, do I want to pay for it a few bucks a month for forever?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com