Why does Apple not combine Calendar and Reminders into one app?

In that customers do not know exactly what each of them does.

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The only integration I really want between the two is to make it easy to add a time block to my calendar for a task.

(Actually I want that for Omnifocus rather than Reminders. And possibly Fantastical as the calendar UI.)

I was talking about iTunes when it actually had its own app on macOS… :stuck_out_tongue:

And as I said before, iTunes is dead.

It is perfectly usable in older versions of macOS, so it isn’t dead.

@anon54919170 Busycal integrates both

Yes, but Apple doesn’t.

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If one considers that Calendar is a calendar, and Reminders is more of a task list, separation of the data categories is considered a best practice by people like David Allen (GTD). Personally, I think separate apps helps to minimize the many negatives of using one’s calendar as a to-do list.

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I think OP has a good point about having them together, I mean, why not? an entry in your calendar is also something to-do.

Maybe it’s because I’m more of a visual person.

personally I find BusyCal indispensable and have it open at all times in all my devices. I can see at a glance what’s pending and what needs to be done, big hairy goals, small ones too.
Having it all in one place minimizes distractions and helps with cognitive load, knowing that everything is in one single place.
It also helps to visually see entries in the calendar and plan accordingly.

In addition, I can also add a reminder in my phone and see it appear in my desktop’s (Busycal) calendar
Better yet, since it’s just Apple Calendar and Apple Reminders they are synced everywhere.

Who knows, maybe someday apple will pull a sherlock and integrate both into a single app :slight_smile:

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The GTD idea seems to be that too many people use calendars for stuff that’s not time-bound, or that’s not specifically time-bound (i.e. it doesn’t have a hard date it has to be done).

So task lists are separate from calendars philosophically, even if tasks can have due dates and such. And I would suggest that the app separation makes it less likely that people do things like assigning due dates and times to things where those dates / time aren’t really applicable, thus preventing the continual rescheduling / snoozing of things that shouldn’t really have been formally scheduled in the first place.

Nothing wrong with having the data accessible in the same app, of course. A centralized dashboard can definitely be a Good Thing. :slight_smile:

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Why not separate “calendar” and "reminders into two different tabs instead of two different apps altogether?

That’s always a possibility. Although for iOS tabs aren’t as much of a thing, and for Mac wouldn’t the difference between “separate tabs” and “separate apps” be largely cosmetic?

In regards to iOS, this is what I meant.
Screen Shot 2021-01-05 at 3.33.53 PM

What would you call the app?

That’s actually a good point - one of the strengths of iOS is the user-intuitive naming for many of the default apps.

What they could do, potentially, is cross-link them within the apps themselves. Kind of like how Phone effectively fires up Contacts from a button at the bottom of the screen. But at that point many of the logical benefits (combined UI and view being a big one) kind of disappear.

It also potentially creates confusion in the broader ecosystem, as most third-party apps I’m aware of don’t combine the two. Combining the factory apps could create the potential for in-app integration that’s ultimately detrimental to the third-party ecosystem, depending on who winds up in charge of iOS in the future.

Kind of like the *NIX design philosophy. A number of tools with well-documented interfaces that can be combined as needed actually is more beneficial, much of the time, than one tool that tries to bundle everything together.

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A strength right up until you need to Google a solution to something. :roll_eyes:

GTD is a method of managing your work. Some of us just aren’t that organised. For me the primary role of both types of data is not to forget things. Having to look in two different places does not aid me in this. In fact, this is one reason why some ‘items’ that others would put in a calendar or task list I leave in my email inbox, because that’s one place I habitually look often.

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Maybe they will. But, in my case, doing so would make it less versatile and I would have to find another reminders app. Unix was designed on the principal of “Do One Thing And Do It Well”. So far, that seems to be working.

IMO, frequently “all in one” software is much the same as “all in one” fax, scanner, printers. Able to do many things, but not the best at any of them.

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ugh, my all-in-one printer…
yeah good point! :slight_smile:

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Keep the name the way it already is.

Yeah. Good for discoverability on device, bad for Googling. :slight_smile:

Yup. I’ve even seen at least one app that seemed to be a task manager based around the email inbox as the main tool.

My thing with GTD as a reference isn’t that I think everybody should use it - it’s that if Apple is designing a productivity app, it feels like they’d be looking to the existing literature and trying to implement best practices. GTD’s splitting of calendar / to-do seems to be in line with the accepted “best practices”.