Intro In iOS 17,
the Reminders app has only seen a few changes this year, but they’re pretty significant ones,
giving the humble little stock Apple reminders app a whole host of new capabilities. So,
in this short video, I’m going to show you exactly what those changes are,
so that you can get on with making the most of what your phone can now do.
OK, let’s get into it.
Shopping Lists; If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably
been making shopping lists in Reminders for a while now, but one of the most frustrating things
about them is when you get to the store. Your list is going to be all over the place, and I usually
have to spend the first minute or so standing in the produce section, trying to mentally group all
the items together. Well, you won’t have to do that anymore, thanks to an improvement in iOS 17.
Now when you create a list, you’ve got the option to choose what type of list it is, choosing from
Standard, Shopping and Smart. If you choose Shopping, your phone knows to anticipate that
the items you’re going to add to the list are all going to be grocery store items, and your phone
will automatically categorise them for you, as you can see with the examples I’m adding on-screen
now. Apple claim that your phone will use machine learning to learn from you over time as well,
helping to make the categories here smarter. Add Sections;
You can now create Sections within Reminders, giving you much more control over how you manage
and organise your lists. So if you’ve got a few items on a Reminders list which would
make sense to be bunched together, you can do that by creating a section, and
putting all of those reminders into that section. Tap on the ellipsis menu in the upper right of a
list, and choose Add Section. A blank section will be created, which you can name. You can then tap
Done, and drag Reminders into that section, or create reminders right into the section.
Repeat this as many times as you need to for various sections, and note that the Add Section
option becomes ‘Manage Sections’ so long as you’ve created at least one, and you can use this menu to
edit and delete sections within your list. Columns (Kanban boards)
If you’ve ever used a Kanban board, you’ll know that they can be a valuable method of managing a
process or a project, and the Reminders app hasn’t ever been capable of displaying information in
that way in the past, but now it is. So here for example, I’ve got a list
where I’ve created some sections, but the sections that I’ve created are kind of steps in a process,
in other words, it would make sense to move items through these steps,
and then complete them at the end, rather than just working down a vertical list.
So if I tap the ellipsis menu at the upper right of the screen, I can then choose View as Columns,
and you can see that the list changes from a typical list view, to a left-to-right board. You
can of course complete an item by tapping on it like you usually would, but you can also tap and
hold to move an item from one column to another. PDF Shoutout
By the way, if you prefer to have content like this in a written format, there’s a PDF version of
this video, complete with screenshots, and you can access it, along with all other PDFs I’ve created,
plus future ones, for just $5 a month. You can either scan the QR code that you can
see on-screen, or follow the link in the description of this video to learn more.
Interactive Widgets A massive quality of life improvement for
iOS 17 is the inclusion of interactive widgets, and Reminders is somewhere that I think a lot
of people are going to actually use this. So here for example, you can see that I’ve
got a shopping list, and I’ve created a widget on my iPhone’s Homescreen for it,
in both iOS 16 and 17. On iOS 16, the items on my shopping list are visible, but if I tap on one of
them, all it does is open Reminders, taking me into the app if I want to complete something.
But on iOS 17, you can see that our checkboxes are visible, right from the widget itself,
meaning I can tap on an item to complete it, without having to open the Reminders app.
This is great, and definitely something I’m going to be using moving forward.
Early Reminders When you create a Reminder, you have the
option to assign a date to it. This is technically the completion date, the date that you need to be
able to tick this off your list by, but you might want reminding of this ahead of time. So here for
example, ordering a card for a birthday party, you’re going to want some lead-time on this.
So you can see that right underneath Date and Time, you’ve got an option called Early
Reminder. Tap into this, and you can choose from presets, but you can also choose Custom, where you
can pick pretty much any timeframe you like, and your phone will give you that early heads-up about
whatever it is you need to do. Remind me about this
This is a function that existed on the iPhone a while back, but for whatever reason it seemed
to stop working, and so I was really happy to know that this seems to be fixed in iOS 17. If
you activate Siri whilst viewing a website, or reading an email, or looking at a note or
a bunch of other things on your iPhone, you can tell it to remind you about that thing.
So for example, here with an email open, I’d simply say “remind me
about this in thirty minutes”, and you can see that the reminder is created.
Or with this email open, I could say “remind me about this in thirty minutes”,
and again the reminder is created. Or with a Note open in the notes app,
I could say “Remind me about this in thirty minutes”, and the reminder is created.
And if I then head into the Reminders app, you can see that not only are the reminders created, but
they each have a link through to that particular thing, so you can get really good at managing
your day effectively, just using your voice assistant and this little hack. Also, drop me
a comment and let me know what other parts of the iPhone you’ve been able to get this to work with.
Autofill Contacts iOS 17 has a new function called AutoFill,
where you can quickly input certain pieces of information at the touch of a button,
and it can be really handy in Reminders. So here for example, I’ve created a Reminder
to call David. But to do this, I’d have to find David’s contact page, get his phone number…
easier is to tap and hold in the Reminder, and choose Autofill, then choose Contact.
Choose the Contact from the contacts page, and tap to select their phone number. You can see that
it’s immediately placed into the Reminder. I could do this for an email as well,
in fact you can do this for most anything that you’d store in a contact’s page.
Also, it’s worth noting that you can also input Passwords from iCloud keychain, and scan text in
here using your iPhone’s camera if you wish. End
So there you go, like I said at the start of the video, there aren’t loads of changes to
Reminders in iOS 17, but the changes that are here are pretty significant. Which ones do you
think you’re going to be making the most use out of? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.