Originally published at: Just Due It: Persistent Notifications for Tasks - TidBITS
In his continuing search for apps that don’t let you forget something because you missed a single notification, Adam Engst looks at Due, which provides persistent notifications for reminders on all your Apple devices.
I’ve been using Due for a decade on iOS. Its two best features are a variety of alert sounds (including usefully noisome ones) and the ability to auto-repeat alerts/alarms as often as every minute.
This made it my default wake-up alarm, and I use it for items I’d otherwise put in Reminders in case I am worried I might miss an alert or I might be away from my phone.
I bought the Mac app too, but I have stopped using it, because sync only works when apps are running. (At least on macOS Ventura, which is the latest version my home iMac runs.) It became very annoying to complete an item early on Mac or iOS then get the alert at the set time on the other device, because sync had not taken place immediately.
I have long considered Due indispensable, but only because Reminders (which I switched to after encountering similar sync issues described for Due) has relatively anemic alerts sounds and auto-snooze/repeat functionality.
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I’ve tried various reminder apps and – at least for my way of living – using Microsoft ToDo is sufficient for keeping track of my tasks and projects. I don’t need many reminders.
I have to wonder if the constant dependence on notification apps increases a person’s anxiety and stress. Than agin, for people with a busier lifestyle than mine, that may be a necessary requirement (the reminders, not the stress [grin]).
Along those lines, has anyone seen a reminder/task list where the categories are: “Must do”, “Should do”, “Could do”, and “Maybe”? I think this would be good task categories.
I took up using Due many years ago after getting sick of Reminders 1. not syncing consistently between ios and mac (the same as every other apple syncing thing), and 2. dropping events off the list after some period of time (days or weeks). I wanted my list of reminders to persist until I’ve completed the thing.
I highly recommend Due, and it has cool sounds.
I have an issue where iOS won’t thump my iwatch when I get a text. I keep trying to find the settings where this might be enabled and I think it should be from what I can find. I think reminders and calendar notifications will work for me. Thanks for the article.
Thanks for this, @Ace.
Yes, the biggest issue with Do really is the fact that it’s a closed silo: no interoperability with the rest of the system and other platforms, even when your system Reminders come from CalDAV. It’s one trick really is the notifications pestering. Apple really should just add this as a feature.
Slightly related but I have had occasion recently to explore the various push apps that have user-facing APIs for sending notifications to your devices, and Pushover seems to be unique in having the feature of “Emergency” pushes, which can (at your option) bypass all Focus controls and any setting of the mute or volume controls, and which repeatedly recur for a specified length of time at a specified interval until it’s acknowledged. You could plausibly use this functionality to implement “Just Do It” notifications of your own design, complete with automatic launch actions. Just an idea you might consider, if you’ve the motivation.
Due has worked well for me for a long time. It’s easily worth five bucks a year. To get over Siri having trouble with “Due” vs “Do”, I created a shortcut called “Gotta Do”. So I can say “Hey, Siri, gotta do” and then “Thing to do in fourteen hours” or “Thing to do Thursday at four”, etc.
I keep intending to take better advantage of OmniFocus. I wish it had a nag feature. One year when I was making an OmniFocus push I had “pay property tax” in it. But I didn’t check it enough and missed the payment. That was a multi-hundred-dollar mistake. So now that’s in Due and I haven’t missed a payment since.