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Tag: icloud

Reminders: So many, so frustrating.

Todo lists, tasks, reminders, whatever you want to call them I’m starting to think the correct name is pain in the asses. I currently have 5 completely incompatible implementations of tasks/reminders from 3 different providers, that don’t do me a bit of good since they can’t be synchronized between them.

First, there’s Tasks, in Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning. It’s great that the Mozilla foundation though that a task list was worthwhile to include the only problem is no service seems to exist that they can be synced with. It won’t even let me create/sync them with the newish tasks feature that Google has added to Gmail/Google Apps for Domains.

Which brings us to Google’s tasks, long awaited and requested they finally got around to implementing them. Only catch is there doesn’t appear to be a way to synchronize them to something outside of Gmail, no support in Thunderbird, no way to get them on my phone. Maybe there’s better support if you’re on an android phone, but that has it’s issues as well.

Finally we have iCloud and Reminders, added to Apple’s iOS 5. Again, there’s no way to sync them (at least as far as I can tell) to a desktop client (at least not a Windows one), or for that matter get them out of iCloud. They sync between my phone and iCloud, I can edit and creat them from my browser though iCloud.com, but is that really ideal? Not to me. They do have a number of really cool features though, like the location based stuff.

NIH (not invented here) syndrome is driving me up a wall, why there isn’t a simple universally agreed upon standard for communicating tasks/reminders between various desktop and mobile devices. I shouldn’t have to fire up iCloud to add a task that I could have added while I was in Thunderbird replying to an email.

The more things go towards being digital, and especially in the cloud, the less they seem to be able to work well together. This, I think, needs to be fixed sooner rather than later, as it stands it’s just driving me up a wall.