Reminders

How to use grocery lists in Reminders on iPhone

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Faster Shopping
Find your way around the store faster by converting your Reminders list into a grocery list.
Image: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

In iOS 17, you can use Apple’s Reminders as a grocery list app on your iPhone — and items you add are automatically sorted into common sections.

This proves incredibly helpful when you go shopping. Just open the Reminders app, and you can easily see if you’ve got everything you need as you’re making your way through the store.

I’ll show you how to use it, including how to share your Reminders app grocery list with someone else so you can both add items and check them off the same list.

Get organized with advanced new features in Notes and Reminders

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Get yourself organized in there!
Get yourselves organized in Notes and Reminders using these advanced features.
Image: Fredericknoronha/Wikimedia Commons and D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

Notes and Reminders, two stock apps that come with every iPhone, iPad and Mac, can do so much more than write shopping lists and apologies on Twitter.

With tagging, you can quickly filter and search through a big folder of notes or a long to-do list. You can easily put together a bunch of filters by date, location and tag to create a smart list of everything that needs your attention in Reminders. You can even set up template Reminders lists that you can copy at any time.

Let me show you how to set it all up.

First macOS 11.3 beta brings tweaks to Safari and Reminders

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First macOS 11.3 beta brings tweaks to Safari and Reminders
Those in the Apple Developer Program can begin testing macOS Big Sur 11.3.
Image: Cult of Mac

A mere day after the release of a fresh macOS version, Apple went ahead and seeded to developers macOS 11.3 beta 1. The company isn’t one to sit on its hands.

The new beta includes small improvments to Safari and Reminders. And enhancements to a range of other features too. Plus bug fixes, of course.

How to use some of the best new features in iOS 14

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How to use the best features in iOS 14
Learn how to use widgets, the App Drawer, and more.
Image: Apple/Cult of Mac

iOS 14 is finally out and packed full of awesome new features that make being an iPhone user even greater. We’ve got real Home screen widgets, a useful new App Drawer, Picture in Picture, and more!

If you were able to avoid the iOS 14 beta and all these things are still brand-new to you, you might be wondering how some of them work. Well, don’t worry — Cult of Mac has how-to guides on all of them.

Find out how to use some of the best new features in iOS 14 right here.

Toggle ‘shopping mode’ on your iPhone for touch-free, mask-friendly grocery buying

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Make safe grocery acquisition a little easier with Drafts' shopping mode.
Make safe grocery acquisition a little easier with Drafts' shopping mode.
Photo: David Clarke/Unsplash

During the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ve probably become hyper-aware of how much you touch everything. Your face, your iPhone, the AirPods you never clean, the filthy handle on your apartment building’s front door, etc. And when you visit the store, using your iPhone’s Reminders app for your shopping list, you’re likely forever tapping the iPhone and using Face ID to wake it up again.

Clearly that’s useless if you’re being responsible and wearing a mask in the supermarket. Today we’ll see how to quickly toggle a “shopping mode” in the Drafts app, which will keep your iPhone awake while you dash down the aisles.

How to use iOS 13’s new ‘Remind me when messaging’ feature

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Remind when messaging
Remember things, when you need them.
Photo: Estée Janssens

The Reminders app got a total revamp in iOS 13, making it way quicker and easier to add due dates, alerts and location-based notifications to new reminders. But it also added one killer new feature: Remind me when messaging.

This lets you add a contact to the reminder, and the next time you’re messaging that person, a notification will pop up.

Why your iPhone reminders won‘t sync with your Mac

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Reminders app on iOS 13 On iPhone X
Reminders in iOS 13 don’t play nice with macOS Mojave.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

The Reminders app in iOS 13 is a massive upgrade, offering multiple new features to make this utility software more useful. But some people might be frustrated because they can‘t get their reminders to synchronize with their Mac. Apple warns that this will continue until the next version of macOS is released.

Check out these great hidden features in iOS 13’s Reminders app

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iOS-13-reminders-app
The new iOS 13 Reminders app.
Photo: Ben Geskin

Apple’s Reminders app gets a massive update in iPadOS and iOS 13. It’s no longer a joke app that needs a million taps just to set a notification time on your action item. We already know about the new layout, which splits tasks into Today, Scheduled, All and Lists, and we also know about the excellent new natural-language input, which makes typing a reminder as easy as dictating it to Siri.

But the big update also brings some other new features you likely haven’t heard about yet: Today Notifications and Type to Siri (right there in the Spotlight screen).

iOS 13 makes the Reminders app a great task manager [Video]

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Reminders app on iOS 13 On iPhone X
The Reminders app finally looks and acts like a grownup task manager.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

As we draw nearer to the official release of iOS 13, things are starting to take their final form – as rocky as that may seem at times. One of the more stable, and more useful updates is to the Reminders app on iPhone and iPad.

Reminders was introduced back in iOS 5, and aside from losing some texture in iOS 7,the app has mostly been unchanged. In iOS 13, Apple is finally modernizing and improving on their task and to-do app to make it more functional and more competitive against many third party task managers.

iOS 13 beta 5 arrives along with new tvOS 13 build

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Test shows how much battery Dark Mode will save you on certain iPhones
Test shows how much battery Dark Mode will save you on certain iPhones
Photo: Apple

Developers received a fresh batch of new beta builds this morning in the form of iOS 13 beta 5. Apple seeded the new software updates just under two weeks after the last set of betas came out, bringing fresh changes to mouse support on iPad, smaller quick action menus and tons of bug fixes.

Finally, iOS 13 can create reminders from Mail

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iOS 13's new Reminders app.
iOS 13's new Reminders app.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

We already know that Apple has completely made over the Reminders app in iOS 13, adding a new, more powerful layout, and some excellent quick-entry tools so you don’t have to tap the screen like a million times just to remember to take out the trash when you get home.

But Reminders has also gotten its virtual claws deeper into the rest of iOS. Today we’ll see two great integrations that you might not have heard about yet.

Third betas for iOS 13 and iPadOS arrive for devs

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ios13
Users can't wait to get their hands on iOS 13.
Photo: Apple

Apple seeded the third beta build of iOS 13 and iPadOS to developers this morning, bringing a host of new tweaks and bug fixes to test devices just before the 4th of July break.

iOS 13 beta 3 arrives just over two weeks after Apple dropped the last developer beta. The first iOS 13 public beta came out a week ago. Apple also released the third betas of tvOS 13, watchOS 6 and macOS Catalina today.

iOS 13 and iPadOS betas are now available to everyone

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iPadOS gets a new home screen design.
They’re just not ready for everyone.
Photo: Apple

The first public beta of iOS 13 is finally available to public testers.

Apple launched iOS 13 public beta 1 and iPadOS public beta 1 this morning. The software gives everyone the opportunity to try out all the new features, like the system-wide Dark Mode that looks absolutely beautiful. However, you might not want to take the jump quite yet.

All the major features to expect in macOS 10.15

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MacBook Pro coding
Apple is coding up some big upgrades for Mac this fall.
Photo: Apple

iOS 13 is expected to be the star of WWDC 2019, but this year’s conference could unleash some of the biggest changes for the Mac we’ve ever seen.

The rumor mill has been dishing out tons of details about macOS 10.15 in the lead up to WWDC 2019. We’ve already seen screenshots of some of the new apps and gotten some good details on how iOS apps are making their way onto the Mac. There’s still plenty of room for Apple to surprise us when it reveals the full details of macOS 10.15 on June 3, but here’s what we know about it so far.

Rumor roundup: What to expect in iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 [Video]

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holding iPhone with
iOS 13 could offer tons of huge improvements to Apple's mobile operating system.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

The last few weeks have been packed with rumors and leaks about what Apple may have in store for us with iOS 13 and macOS 10.15. With so much information coming out day after day, it’s hard to keep track of all the possible rumors.

Fortunately for you, we’ve compiled the full list of expected features coming this year to iOS and macOS. From dark mode to iPad updates, and new Mac apps to Siri improvements, here’s everything we are expecting (so far) in iOS 13 and macOS 10.15.

How to create and delete alarms and timers with Siri

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Even Siri can manage to set alarms and timers without screwing it up.
Even Siri can manage to set alarms and timers without screwing it up.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Siri may still be hopeless, but one thing it’s always been good at is setting alarms. In fact, I don’t use Siri much at all any more1, but for alarms and timers, I use it exclusively. Even with iOS 12’s great 3-D Touch timer widget, Siri is quicker.

Today we’ll see how to tell Siri to create an alarm, set a timer, how to edit an alarm, and how to delete one.

How to replace Apple’s annoying Reminders app

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Memento is way, way better than Apple’s own Reminders app.
Memento is way, way better than Apple’s own Reminders app.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

It seems like Apple’s Reminders app was made by a surly teenager who would rather have been watching YouTube videos than coding that afternoon. It offers the bare minimum of everything.

Our hypothetical teen developer clearly never actually needed to be reminded of anything, because entering something as obvious as a task with a due date takes four taps at various spots on the screen just to get to the date picker. And remember that this is a reminders app, the purpose of which is to remind you of things. Imagine a text editor where you had to press each letter key several times to type that letter.

Fortunately, you can pick from a zillion other iOS reminders apps, and all of them use the same central Reminders lists you already probably utilize. Today we’ll see how to set a reminder way, way quicker than with Apple’s built-in abomination. Today we’ll check out how to use Memento.

How to run Siri Shortcuts from Reminder alerts

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Get a reminder to log your run every day.
Get a reminder to log your run every day.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Today we’ll see how to put a Shortcut into a reminder, so you can just tap the reminder alert to run it.

For this, we’ll use the new iOS 12 Shortcuts app, or Apple’s existing Workflow app. For instance, you could have a reminder that pops up every morning at 9AM, telling you to log your run. In the pop-up alert, right there on the lock screen, will be a button to execute a Shortcut/Workflow to do just that. Tap it, and you’ll be able to log your run via a pop up.

And of course this isn’t limited to fitness, nor even to time-based reminders.