Dear Apple,
Hi there. It’s me again. I am enjoying my iPhone 4S immensely (even though pre-ordering one was a right pain in my ass). I think Siri is great and I use it all the time to draft text messages and create calendar events and reminders. It’s definitely a feature you can call “magical” all you want, in my book. But that new Reminders app… that could use a few changes, please.
First and foremost, why aren’t my lists in Reminders sortable? I have to admit that I’m pretty stumped you guys overlooked this basic feature in an app that’s mean to store tasks. Sure, there’s that Date tab at the top but this only shows me tasks scheduled I have for today (and subsequent individual days if I flip through them sequentially). But I want to see my entire list sorted by due date. Some of my tasks are several months in the future, you know, and swiping through page by page is a horrible way to get to them. Maybe make it how the default Completed list displays items? See? You already know how to do this one!
Adding on to that, I’d love to be able to set a priority for my tasks as well. So if I have a number of tasks due on a certain date (and you let me sort them) I can view the most important ones at the top of the list. You get how that makes sense, right? Not all tasks are created equal, even if they are due on the same day.
Also, I’m not perfect (clearly!). I don’t complete tasks on the scheduled date sometimes often. Time escapes me every now and then. I get sucked into a good book. I play way too much Fruit Ninja or Jetpack Joyride. Or I give in to the old puppy dog eyes routine and take Jake out on one more walk because the weather is so nice. And then stuff doesn’t get done as planned. How about some help with that? Like some options for repeating alarms for tasks with due dates? And a little visual reminder that turns the text red or something? These additional cues don’t need to “surprise and delight” me with any particular slickness or anything. They just need to be there and work, please.
I know you can fix Reminders, Apple. I want Reminders to be my default to do app now that it’s integrated via iCloud with iCal on my Mac. There are a ton of other excellent to do apps in the App Store that have all of these features. Not that I want you to copy them, but at least catch up to them in terms of features, please?
Sincerely,
Marianne Schultz
P.S. Thanks for listening to me about the whole voice command feature thing. Again, Siri is really cool.
Thank you so much for writing this! I couldn’t agree more. Sorting the list by date and/or priority is what this app needs. May I also add that I would like to be able to set a due date, not an alert, a due date, you know, like I can at http://www.icloud.com. Once I set a due date at http://www.icloud.com I can manipulate it in the Reminders app so, again, it clearly already knows how to handle due dates, but why can’t it actually set them. Most of the time I just want to have a list of things I need to get done that day and I don’t need my phone beeping at me every hour to tell me I have something more to do.
Other than that and what Marianne mentions above I have come to use the Reminders application as my task manager, but having these additional features would make this the best, simple task manager for the iPhone. Thanks for doing a great job Apple.
— Todd
Todd,
Great minds think alike! 😉 I really do hope that Apple makes changes to Reminders to put it on par with some basic features most other tasks apps already have. Combined with the geolocation capabilities it already has and integration with iCloud and iCal on the Mac, it could really be a killer app.