- Setting up Calendars
- Working with Calendars on the iCloud Website
- Sharing Your Calendars with Others
- Subscribing to Public Calendars
- Setting iCloud Calendar Preferences
- Adding Reminders
- Working with Reminders on Your iOS Device
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Working with Reminders on Your iOS Device
As mentioned before, you work with iCloud reminders on an iOS device in the Reminders app, which was introduced with iOS 5. Even though a reminders list is a kind of calendar, it makes sense to me that Apple chose to separate managing events and reminders on mobile devices, because adding the interface necessary to properly deal with reminders into the Calendar iOS app would have made the app feel as though those reminder features were shoehorned in.
In this section, you’ll see how to use the Reminders app to set up a to-do. Adding or editing a task in Reminders makes it automatically synchronize with the rest of your iCloud-enabled devices.
To set a reminder:
- Start the Reminders app.
The app appears, set to its default List view
. To see your tasks that have due dates, tap the Date button 
. Note that tasks that don’t have due dates will not appear in the Date view, though all tasks assigned to a particular list (whether they have dates or not) will show when you select that list in List view.
You’ll work with your tasks in the Reminders app. This is the List view.
You can see tasks with associated due date in the Date view.On the iPhone or iPod touch, you can move between your different reminders lists in List view by swiping right or left. Similarly, in Date view, you can change the date by swiping right or left, or by tapping a date in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. On the iPad, with its larger screen, you can see more information at one time
. - In either List or Date view, tap the plus button to add a reminder.
In the list that you’re on, on the first blank line, an insertion point appears.
- Type the reminder title
.
Enter the title for your reminder. - (Optional) You can tap the Return key and enter more tasks.
- On an iPhone or iPod touch, tap the Done button. On an iPad, tap somewhere other than the line you’re typing in, or tap the Hide Keyboard key
.
The new reminder appears in the list.
- To adjust the reminder’s details, tap it in the list. A Details screen or popover (on the iPad) appears
.
On the Details screen, you can choose to set a reminder date or location, or you can add other information to the reminder.On this screen, you can set a time or geographical reminder by tapping Remind Me.
or
If you tap Show More, you have the opportunity to set the reminder’s Priority, change its assigned reminders list, or add Notes.
- To set a due date or geographical reminder, tap Remind Me.
- On the resulting Remind Me screen
, you can turn on either (or both) On a Day and At a Location.
You can set either time or location-based reminders.If you choose On a Day, Reminders will show you the standard date and time picker. Choose when you want to be reminded, then tap Done.
If you choose At a Location, the Location screen will appear, showing your current location, your Home and Work locations from your iCloud Contacts list, and a Choose Address button. Tapping that button opens your Contacts list, from which you can choose the location where you want to be reminded. Pick a contact with an address, and you’ll be returned to the Location screen. When you tap the Remind Me button, you’ll see the contact name and address
. You’ll also get two new options, When I Leave and When I Arrive. Choose one of these.
If you choose to be reminded at a location, you can also choose whether that reminder triggers when you leave or arrive at the location. - Tap Done.
)
Reminders or Alarms?
With the advent of the Reminders iOS app, you now have more than one way to alert yourself when things need doing. You can use the Reminders app, as described above. But for some purposes, you might want to instead use the Alarm function of the iPhone’s Clock app. Let’s take a look at the differences between the two approaches.
The Reminders app is associated with your iCloud calendars and to-dos, and as a result synchronizes across all of your devices. That’s great when you want that to happen, but sometimes you don’t. For example, let’s say that you need to take a medication each evening. You could certainly set up a Reminder for that, and it would appear on your Reminder List every day. That would tend to clutter up the Reminder List, especially if you had similar routine reminders. When the Reminder triggers, because it is associated with iCloud and synchronizes between your devices, you’ll get alerts on all your devices, and you’ll need to dismiss those alerts on all devices. I’ve certainly found it to be jarring when I had my iPhone, iPad, and Mac all in one room, and they all popped up a Reminder alert and made a noise at the same time.
On the other hand, the Clock app only runs on the iPhone, which you often carry on your person, and you can set it up to give you a recurring alarm (as well as setting as many different alarms you need in a particular day). Because it’s not integrated with iCloud, there is no calendar clutter. And the Clock app’s repeating function 
has day-of-the-week options that the Reminders app does not 
. By the way, if you need multiple reminders in the same day, there’s a terrific app called HabiTimer from Sciral that’s perfect for things that neither Clock nor Reminders does well, like alerting you to take medications multiple times in a day.
In the Clock app, you have a bit more flexibility in terms of recurring day-of-the-week alarms.
The Reminders app allows you to set reminders at intervals up to a year away.