the godawful clusterfuck that is text based reminders on the Mac
I'm sure this is way worse in other operating systems, but I am gonna hold Apple to the high standards I expect from them. Now as some of you know, I am a bit of an obsessive over-structuring sperglord. So in this capacity I like having clean systems that feed me current stuff because if there is ambivalence I fucking lose my shit and rage. With the advent of the iPhone, we have wonderful new ways of capturing 'oh shit I should get this crap done' in fast ad-hoc ways. If we ignore the bajillion 3rd party apps, we have the following options (shout if I missed any)
in iOS:
- make a Note in Notes
- make a Reminder in Reminders
- make a Entry on your Calendar
on the Mac we also have
- Stickies, which are basically old colored versions of Notes which can be open in several windows. They had these back in the pre-OSX days
So this is a mess. Granted it is now LESS of a mess than it was - To-do's first being created in iCal, then awkwardly synced to Mail, and now finally broken off into Reminders. Hoswever things get worse when you try to sync these across multiple accounts and multiple devices and multiple OS versions. Notes especially creates a godawful clusterfuck since it seems to get really confused about syncing to 'on my mac', 'iCould', and 'Gmail'.
If you ask me, there should be TWO apps.
1. a To Do app, combining Reminders and iCal, which supports time and context sensitive / insensitive actions. iCal akready supports different calendar types, how is this any different from different contexts in Reminders
2. a basic text editor. We already have one, we've had one for decades. Its been called Edit, TeachText (we had this on our first Mac SE back in 1987), SimpleText and now TextEdit. Kill Notes, please. TextEdit supports shitty background colors and horrible fonts. It already saves to The Cloud (hell that's the Default), so fucking show that list instead of some nonsense internal list that Notes fetches from god knows where and causes duplicate mess clusterfuck depending on how you chose to sync and what accounts you have connected to that instance.
Even writing this post - I didn't want to write this on the Notes app on the iPad beause I knew it would be a clusterfuck. This iPad hasn't been synced since I did a big cleanup and wiped about 30 notes. The iPad still has them, whereas the iPhone and Mac don't (they synced fine).
Now, are these stored as some sort of 'delete note' object? Fuck no!
Well then did all these old shitty notes sync across to my iPhone? No! I just have an iPad with over 30 notes, whereas my iphone and mac both have 3 (the actual number i should have). The iPhone note I made two hours ago at the gym synced aross to this iPad just fine. Why the fuck do I then have over two dozen old vestigial shit notes? fuck man what is the point of syncing if i have to manually zap them from every concievable device i have? That is not what 'synchronized' means at all, that is a clusterfuck.
Don't get me started on what a mess Contacts was.
/rant
As to how to organize all this stuff into a semblance of something useable, I have to say Things is getting better. If you use Tags as contexts, you're doing ok. Still missing asynchronous project actions and higher levels of organization than just 'areas of focus', but its balance of useability and features is pretty sweet. Oh it's also missing having one action step be shared by many projects.
in iOS:
- make a Note in Notes
- make a Reminder in Reminders
- make a Entry on your Calendar
on the Mac we also have
- Stickies, which are basically old colored versions of Notes which can be open in several windows. They had these back in the pre-OSX days
So this is a mess. Granted it is now LESS of a mess than it was - To-do's first being created in iCal, then awkwardly synced to Mail, and now finally broken off into Reminders. Hoswever things get worse when you try to sync these across multiple accounts and multiple devices and multiple OS versions. Notes especially creates a godawful clusterfuck since it seems to get really confused about syncing to 'on my mac', 'iCould', and 'Gmail'.
If you ask me, there should be TWO apps.
1. a To Do app, combining Reminders and iCal, which supports time and context sensitive / insensitive actions. iCal akready supports different calendar types, how is this any different from different contexts in Reminders
2. a basic text editor. We already have one, we've had one for decades. Its been called Edit, TeachText (we had this on our first Mac SE back in 1987), SimpleText and now TextEdit. Kill Notes, please. TextEdit supports shitty background colors and horrible fonts. It already saves to The Cloud (hell that's the Default), so fucking show that list instead of some nonsense internal list that Notes fetches from god knows where and causes duplicate mess clusterfuck depending on how you chose to sync and what accounts you have connected to that instance.
Even writing this post - I didn't want to write this on the Notes app on the iPad beause I knew it would be a clusterfuck. This iPad hasn't been synced since I did a big cleanup and wiped about 30 notes. The iPad still has them, whereas the iPhone and Mac don't (they synced fine).
Now, are these stored as some sort of 'delete note' object? Fuck no!
Well then did all these old shitty notes sync across to my iPhone? No! I just have an iPad with over 30 notes, whereas my iphone and mac both have 3 (the actual number i should have). The iPhone note I made two hours ago at the gym synced aross to this iPad just fine. Why the fuck do I then have over two dozen old vestigial shit notes? fuck man what is the point of syncing if i have to manually zap them from every concievable device i have? That is not what 'synchronized' means at all, that is a clusterfuck.
Don't get me started on what a mess Contacts was.
/rant
As to how to organize all this stuff into a semblance of something useable, I have to say Things is getting better. If you use Tags as contexts, you're doing ok. Still missing asynchronous project actions and higher levels of organization than just 'areas of focus', but its balance of useability and features is pretty sweet. Oh it's also missing having one action step be shared by many projects.