10/9/19
9:00 am

New Features In the Reminders App in macOS Catalina

The new Reminders app adds a lot of new useful features. You can now set an icon and color for each list, place lists inside of folder, and view all of your lists in one long screen. You can also see which reminders items from all lists are due today or in the upcoming days. When creating a new reminder, you can easily add a due date, location, photo or URL.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new features in Reminders in macOS Catalina.
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So the Reminders app in Catalina has a lot of new features to match the Reminders app in iOS 13. They work together, of course, through iCloud. Update one and see the updates on the other. The first thing you'll notice in the Reminders app are these four things right here. They are different ways of viewing your lists. So you can have multiple lists just like before and a normal way to view them would be to simply view them by list. By clicking on each individual list. But you also have these alternative ways of viewing things.
For instance, Today will show you any reminders from any of these lists that have a due date of today. So you can see them all grouped together even if they're from different lists. In Scheduled you'll see Today as well but also any other reminders in any list that have a due date or time at all. Notice that you have a Plus button under each. You can add a new item directly here. This will go into your Default list. The default list is what you have set under Reminders, Preferences. You can also add new items to Today as well. You just click there at the bottom, or use the Plus button, and you can add one to your Default list that will automatically be set to be due today.
Now the All list will show you everything from all of your lists in one long view. So you'll see each list in the order they are here and you can see every item in it. It's an alternative to just viewing it list by list like that. You can do All and see everything. You can also add to any list here in this view. Also if you've got completed items here you can choose whether or not they are shown or hidden.
The Flag list allows you too see just the items from all your different lists that have been flagged. I'll show you how to flag items in a minute.
Now a big new feature of the lists is the ability to change the icon type and color. So it's pretty easy to do this in iOS 13 but here if you create a new list it doesn't ask you. So you need to go in and do it afterwards. If you click on the name, if you're editing the name of the list, but you double click on the icon then you go into a special mode here where you can edit the name and also change the icon and color. So, for instance, for groceries let's change to a shopping cart icon and make it a green color. Then for Pharmacy I can double click on that and we'll stick with the blue color but change to a shopping cart there as well. So this might make it easier to find your list since they would have a different color and also an icon. Notice if I go to the list of All now you can see it uses the color there in the name of the list.
Now you have the ability to further organize your lists by creating groups or folders. So let's click on a list to select it and I'm going to create a new group. It's going to create a new group or folder with that list in it. We'll call it Shopping and you can drag and drop another list into it as well. I'll put the pharmacy shopping list in there also. Now you can open and close that list. So it gives you the ability to kind of tame your list of lists here if you've got a lot of them.
When you go to add a new item you get some additional features here. You can enter the name of the item. Of course you can also do Notes right below it in the next line. But you also have Add Date, Add Location, and there's the Flag there. Now if I flag this particular reminder and hit Return to add that item you can see it's flagged here on the right and it is now listed under Flagged. You also have these other things here. You can Add Date and it gives you suggestions like Today, Tomorrow, This Weekend, or you can use Custom date for any date there. If you want to get more detail just click the i button here and you can do On Day but you can also do On Time and Add a Location. Add Location is also over here so you can click that and select your current location. You can also select when you get into your car and when you get out of your car. You can add any address or name of a business or something and it will look it up using the Maps App data and you can add that as a location as well. This is, of course, a lot more useful on the iPhone. So you can enter this in on your Mac but then your iPhone is probably the device that's going to remind you when you arrive somewhere.
You also get the ability to add a person. When you add that person, if you're messaging with them, you'll get a notification that you have a reminder pertaining to that person. That will help you remember to mention something to that person during that conversation.
Just as before you can set priority for things. You can also set reminders to Repeat. So it could be repeating a reminder like something that will remind you everyday. You can add a URL here. You can also add an image. You can do that here with this button but dragging and dropping is probably the better way to do it. So you can do it from the Finder from a file. But you can also do it from the Photos app. So in the Photos app here I can drag a photo and create a new Reminder with it or add it to an existing reminder. You can see it has added a photo there. So it's just another element you can add here to an individual reminder.
Likewise you can add a URL that way. So you can be in Safari here and you can drag a URL into a Reminder and you can see it adds it there. These will also appear if you go to Share something like share a URL and say I want to Share it in Reminders. It will automatically put that URL as part of the reminder.
The Reminders app is really maturing at this point. I use it to keep track of ideas, ideas for episodes, ideas for blog posts, ideas for my business. I also, of course, use it to quickly add reminders to get an alert at a certain time. Usually when I do that I'm using Siri to add to it and you can still do that as well. But then it's useful to be able to go in and edit and flag and do all of that. The new Reminders app gives you even more options to keep things organized.

Comments: 18 Responses to “New Features In the Reminders App in macOS Catalina”

Jean-Marc

5 years ago

Hi Gary, I updated to Catalina and IOs 13 on my phone, I have an old iPad 2 with the latest available system fo it iOS 9,3,5 I lost all my reminders and lists on it and it won't sync anymore. Anything I can do ?
Thanks Gary.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Jean-Marc: You just can't access Reminders on that older device. The old version of iOS on it couldn't know about how Reminders data structures work in the future.

John Bianca

5 years ago

I hate the extra drop-down "help" like Notes, Add Date, Add Location. Isn't a Reminder already a Note? Why add a separate Note? Duh? It gets in the way. Can those features be removed? Something else gets in the way: type the word "tomorrow" in your entry and a gray box comes up with "Suggested Dates? Yuck! Sometimes software tries to do too much and this is a perfect example of ruining a perfectly simple app. For example, GarageBand got way too overwhelming. (Patreon supporter)

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

John: A lot of reasons to have notes attached to a Reminder. I use reminders to keep track of ideas, and I put the title of the idea as the reminder and more info in the note. I do the same with complex to-do items. But I'm sure others don't use the notes at all. They have been around for a while, though, that isn't new. Also, even if you type the word "tomorrow" you can just keep typing and ignore the suggestion.
For context: Lots of people have been complaining for a long time that the Reminders app isn't good enough, that it doesn't compare to other similar apps. So this is Apple's answer.

John Bianca

5 years ago

Cool. Your uses are good. I'm used to putting all info in the Reminder itself. For longer notes and details I use the Notes app. I'm sure I'll adjust and figure out ways to make it work to my advantage. (PS: I didn't even realize a notes option for Reminders previously existed.) It's there too for the phone I just discovered, but to enter a note, you click on the letter "i" in the circle. TY

Mike bernstein

5 years ago

I wish reminders would have ability to recognize and dial a phone number. Many times I set a reminder to call someone that is not in my contacts and does not need to be there, when I enter phone number in reminders it is very inconvenient where I have to remember the number go to phone app and dial from there. Any tips ?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Mike: It can. Just make a reminder like "Call 303-555-1212" on the Mac at least that becomes a link you can click to call. On the iPhone it doesn't, but you can copy and paste the phone number.

Roger Mann

5 years ago

When I set a reminder for a date like on October 15 I want to "Make Friday dinner reservations". Reminders moves the reminder to October 18, which is Friday so the reservations never get made on October 15. This is stupid and annoying.

Roger

5 years ago

Apple says that Reminders will not work on my iPhone or iPad. Can I use the Reminders on my iMac with out upgrading and continue to have my reminders sync on all three devices?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Roger: Right. That's the way to do it. Don't agree to update Reminders so they work on all devices, but without the new features.

John Bianca

5 years ago

How do I print my Reminders in Catalina? Prior to this update, you were able to copy the Reminder List and paste into another document. Now, you are unable to copy/paste into anything. You also cannot print from the Reminder App on Mac and you cannot print from Reminders in iCloud.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

John: You should send that to Apple Feedback. I did find that printing from the iCloud.com web app does work sometimes. I tried it like 10 times and it worked twice. Seemed to work more often if I Control+clicked on the page and chose Print Window.

Bruce McIntosh

5 years ago

Is it possible to change the default due date?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Bruce: There is no setting for that.

Dan Gillett

5 years ago

Can you create new and/or customize the list feature?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Dan: Not sure what you are asking. What "list feature" do you mean? You can certainly create new lists.

Jim Mooney

5 years ago

That is a super video and like opening a new door to scripting. I did not know that you could directly use Javascript in the scripting app.

This is driving me crazy. The methods you use I can't find in any dictionary. app.lists.byName() ?? I see app.list, not the plural, can you just add an s to obj? Where is the definition of byName(). ? other options than byName? I can't find it in the dictionary for this. Where to be found?

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Jim: Launch Script Editor (comes with macOS), Choose Window, Library. Select a topic from the window by double-clicking it. Then you'll see a reference window. Make sure you switch it to JavaScript as AppleScript is the default. Then you'll be able to browse around in all the JXA syntax. The reference is pretty bare-bones, with no examples, but it is all there.

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New Features In the Reminders App in macOS Catalina

Comments: 18 Responses to “New Features In the Reminders App in macOS Catalina”

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