OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Reminders

Reminders is a to do–list program. It not only records your life’s little tasks, but it also reminds you about them when the time comes. On a laptop, Reminders can even remind you about something based on where you are, just as it does on the iPhone. For example, when you arrive home each day, it can remind you to feed your cats—or when you leave your vacation house, it can ask you if you’ve turned off the gas burners.

If you have an iCloud account, your reminders sync across all your gadgets. Create or check off a task on your iPhone, and you’ll also find it created or checked off on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or PC. (Yes, PC. See www.apple.com/icloud/setup/pc.html).

The syncing business also explains why the location feature is useful even if you have a desktop Mac that doesn’t move around a lot. You can program a reminder on your Mac—and your phone or tablet will alert you when you move into or away from a specified place.

Tip

If you have an iPhone—oh, wow. Siri and Reminders are a match made in heaven. “Remind me to file the Jenkins report when I get to work.” “Remind me to set the TiVo for tonight at 8.” “Remind me about Timmy’s soccer game a week from Saturday.” “Add waffles to my Groceries list.” Speech recognition rocks when it comes to leaving notes for yourself. And iCloud will take care of copying those reminders to your Mac.

Once you’ve opened Reminders (Figure 10-38), you record a new task by clicking the button in the upper right, or choose File→New ...