Monday, May 2, 2022

Reminders API Requests

Dr. Drang:

A couple of days ago, Federico Viticci tweeted his wish list for a new or updated Reminders API and asked for other people for theirs. Stephen Hackett answered with this:

parameters for repeating tasks

Stephen’s simple request is exactly what I want, too. In fact, a way to script repeating tasks has been the top item on my wish list since well before Reminders existed.

I lost interest in Reminders as soon as I realized that the order of the reminders didn’t sync between devices. I think that did eventually get fixed. But it doesn’t look like you can change the order via the API or AppleScript. Nor can AppleScript see which reminder is currently selected.

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Reminders, and its API, feels like one of many pieces of software that nobody at Apple actually uses, much less depends on.

Reminders syncing has been broken in my iCloud account for a couple of years, and all of my attempts to rectify it have failed. I've filed Feedback Reporter issues with sysdiagnoses; I've spent hours on the phone with end-user customer support; I've filed a TSI incident which was rejected and returned to me. Disabling, deleting, and re-enabling Reminders causes several gigabytes (!) of sqlite databases to be pulled down from iCloud over the course of an hour, and yet at the end, sync is not coherent among my devices. On the iPhone, even trying to act on notifications, or use the app, causes the UI to lock up for seconds (sometimes minutes) at a time.

Maddening. I just wish I could blow away my entire state on the iCloud side and start anew. So far, I haven't been able to get the help of anyone at Apple to achieve that.

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