I heavily use the Reminders App on my iPhone. I can say things like Remind me to take the baby out of the trunk when I leave the car, and when I turn off the car, the reminder is automatically set.
I’ll put in reminders to call or mail someone, and I’ll put in the notes the phone number or email address, so I don’t have to look it up. However, I was upset that Apple’s data detection couldn’t detect these items. I would have to copy them, open the telephone app or email address, then paste in the address or phone.
Recently, I realized that I could use the URL field too, and I could put in the URL scheme to specify whether it’s a phone number, email address, or even text message.
Here’s putting in a clickable telephone number. Note that the phone goes into the URL field and not the text field:
This probably also works for other apps if you know the URL scheme used. The only downside is that you have to open up details to put the information in, and you can’t do it through Siri.
That is one thing I miss that I cannot understand. If all the information is in the phone and you create a Call X reminder, that you cannot pull in the info like the phone number. I loved that about the Newton, where you could link all sorts of info together such as dates and people. Why iOS is unable to do this is beyond me. I can see it asking for permission to link when you first try it, but the lack of this in an advanced OS is ridiculous.
I seem to remember Siri being able to do that. In fact, it was a feature in Siri as shown in this 9 to 5 Mac article. I also see a note that this functionality seems broken in iOS 13. Here we are in iOS 14 and still broken.
If I remember, you could say things like this email or this webpage or this person when setting reminders when you’re looking at a specific reminder and it’ll pull up that item when you click on the reminder.
“Remind me to call this person when I get to the office”
Or
Remind me to reply to this email when I get home.
Maybe this is why it took me so long to realize I could put a click to call or text item in a reminder. It use to be a function in reminders when you used Siri.
Siri works differently with Reminders and Calendar here.
With Reminders, you just get text, which is usually what I want, since I may have multiple people named Gary in my Contacts, or one Gary may have multiple phone numbers.
With Calendar, whoever you specify (or Siri hears you as specifying) gets invited to the calendar event, which is often (almost always, for me), NOT what I want to have happen. Plus, if I don’t have a contact for the person I’m meeting, it will guess other people who are never correct.
Personally, I prefer the Reminders approach, since I can figure out how to call or email the person on my own in another app or on another machine. But invitations to calendar events almost always cause the recipients confusion.
