Up close with Mountain Lion: Reminders

25.07.2012
Why should the iPhone and iPad have all the fun? In Mountain Lion, Apple continues its process of porting over the best features from iOS to the Mac. Among those is an app first introduced with iOS 5: Reminders.

Reminders, of course, is a tool for recording and storing todo lists, tasks, and any other little bits you want to remember. If you're familiar with the Reminders iOS app, you'll feel right at home in the Mountain Lion version, which is a near-perfect clone.

As with the iPad version of Reminders, the application presents a list of all your lists on the left, with a faux sheet of wide-ruled looseleaf paper on the right.

Because Reminders can sync via iCloud, your Mac and your iOS device can share one common set of todos. They do so via accounts: In lieu of a Preferences option under the Reminders menu, you'll find an entry entitled Accounts. Selecting that actually opens the Mail, Contacts & Calendars pane of System Preferences. There, you can add any iCloud accounts you'd like to use for syncing Reminders. Reminders also works with CalDAV services including Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar; you can similarly add those accounts in System Preferences.

Making a list

To create a new list, you choose File -> New List, double-click on a blank section within the lists sidebar, or click on the Plus (+) icon at the lower left of the Reminders window. The other buttons down there toggle the list sidebar and a small calendar that indicates the dates for which you have reminders scheduled.