Am I the only one who thinks Reminders is the worst Mac app ever?

I used to have "To do" as part of my Mac Ical. Now with Mountain Lion, I have Reminders instead.
Four complaints:
1. Slow to launch.
2. Really slow to search. I'll type in a search term, let's say "forest," and first it will laboriously come up with every result that has an "f" in it, and then slowly advance up from there. Really? It's not my computer setup. Searches in Finder, in Mail, in iTunes are all fast. It's just Reminders that is so slow.
3. Reminders decides when to alert me rather than letting me decide. This seems to be at random, and there is no default position I can find to say "no automatic reminder." (Yes, I know it's kind of ironic to not want a reminder from Reminders.)
4. Sometimes, Reminders' automatic reminders are really bizarre. For example, if I happen to type in someone's birthdate in my reminder item, Reminder will remove that information from the reminder and instead decide to alert me on that date, e.g. "remind me on 6/12/67." Then if I make the mistake of trying to mark that reminder completed before turning off the "remind me on... (date)" the whole app hangs, and I have to use force quit to start over.

Are other people experiencing problems like these?

No. I set reminders that have no fixed reminder date all the time.

Actually, I guess it is slow to launch on first launch, because its doing some iCloud syncing.

And on #2 it pauses after I type the first letter but after that its lightning fast for me, even searching completed reminders.

To set a reminder with no "alarms":



As you can see, unchecking both options gives me a "to-do" item that just sits there till I check the completed box.

automatic reminders

I know I can cancel an automatic reminder by unchecking both boxes, but I don't want to have to do that step. I want as my default that the boxes are unchecked unless I choose to check them. Is there any way to do that?

That IS the default. At least on mine. I create a new reminder by pressing the + key in the upper right and type in the title, press return. This creates a reminder that has no due date, no reminder, no location (until I add one of those things).

Am sort of confused.

I don't use Reminders - because I don't want to be reminded.

But, why would you put something into an app called "Reminders" that you don't want to be reminded of?

I use it for me kinda nice since I am starting to forget and it gets ported over to all my iDevices.

osxx said:

I use it for me kinda nice since I am starting to forget and it gets ported over to all my iDevices.

Click to expand...

Exactly - don't care to be reminded of how much I forget nowadays.

To Tom: Lots of people (me included) use Reminders as a to-do list -- so we want to put in something that we should get "a round tuit" at some point, but not set a specific day or location.

The big advantage of Reminders is that it is iCloud-synced to all devices. So you can ignore that thing you should be doing no matter where you are.

I should have mentioned to the OP that there are loads of more specific to-do list type apps he may want to check out if Reminders isn't doing the job for him, but to me it mostly seems like he's just not using the program right (or something is wrong with it).

I use Evernote for that type of stuff - actually all sorts of stuff - shopping lists, etc. - guess that's the reason have never checked out Reminders.

I already said this in another post but reminders in iOS is great, reminders in OSx is less than good...

I don't use Reminders though I've tried. Generally, I just create a Calendar event with an alarm to serve as a to-do/reminder. If I miss it, I just drag it to the next time on the calendar I think I'll have time. Calendar lets me set multiple alarms, make my to-do item repeat each week/month/etc, attach files, and color-code items for easy reference. Reminders might do all that too, but I wouldn't know. I don't use Reminders since I already have an application and habit that works for me.

Still, I'd be stretching a bit to say Reminders is the worst OS X application ever.

I settled on BusyCal on my iMac. Love the way it integrates calendar and todo on my Mac, and syncs via reminders and iCal in the background to BusyToDo and Calendar on my iDevices. All very simple, seamless and handy for me.