Show HN: macOS Reminder Sync for Obsidian Tasks

Show HN: macOS Reminder Sync for Obsidian Tasks(turquoisehexagon.co.uk)

155 points by rahilb 2 years ago | 108 comments

Greetings,

I started using Obsidian and the brilliant Obsidian Tasks plugin to manage Tasks in my notes however it didn't quite work for me as I would lose track of Tasks when away from my laptop, and there are no reminders for Tasks so it's not easy to stay on top of things.

I wrote my first macOS App to solve the problem; Reminder Sync for Obsidian. It periodically scans your Obsidian Vault for Tasks and creates Reminders for them in Reminders.app! Once your Tasks are created as Reminders they are synced through iCloud so they are also visible on iOS; this solves the main problem I had with Obsidian Tasks, allowing me to keep on top of Tasks with system Reminders and Widgets on macOS and iOS.

Other features apart from the core functionality described above are:

- Creating a Reminder adds a Task to an Inbox note in your Obsidian Vault, allowing you to create Obsidian Tasks from iOS.

- Deleting/Completing a Task in Reminders app completes/deletes the Task in your Vault

The core functionality is free, and I believe the free version should be sufficient for most users. Paid features include increased automatic sync frequency, ability to delete tasks from Reminders.app and ability to generate a description for the Reminder.

The app is available on the App Store: https://apple.co/3TH1e5s

You can view a demo video at the homepage: https://turquoisehexagon.co.uk/remindersync/

I would appreciate any feedback as it's my first solo App release!

oneeyedpigeon 2 years ago |

I use Obsidian daily, but my understanding of the app is terrible. I use it because it's the best markdown editor I've found — I just edit separate .md files, many of which are essentially a 'template' that contains a whole bunch of checkboxes.

Is there a good 'starter guide' that I can use to get up to speed so I can start using Obsidian to track my notes, etc.? I'm very used to editing individual .md files for this kind of thing, but manually, and I get the impression Obsidian offers a bunch of benefits.

TheCapeGreek 2 years ago | |

Honestly, play around until you find your own flow.

You don't need to use every Obsidian feature under the sun to become a productivity machine, nor have it all perfectly organised, linked and categorised in your "second brain". Take notes, label them well, and use the global search when you need something. Try a new plugin from time to time.

Using Obsidian "just" as a markdown editor is a perfectly valid use. I used VSCode with some Markdown plugins for years. I tried Typora, Coda, etc but they felt too limited and sluggish. I just wanted code-like markdown editing with a bit of fanciness, and Obsidian does just that.

I have a template for journalling, and a simplistic structure for where to place files in my knowledgebase. It's not perfect, and doesn't work for everyone, but it works for me.

If you do want an example of some of my structure (I share some of the resource/knowledge publicly), see here: https://publish.obsidian.md/thecapegreek

The only drawback I can say really is that I need to better separate public and private resources, as I'm always afraid I'll accidentally publish some private notes that live among the other files you might see in the link.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2 years ago | |

There’s a lot of crappy “I want to be a content creator!”-tier content out there. You’ve gotta do a bit of digging to find examples that aren’t someone organising their YouTube channel, crappy Medium blog, or other content creation side hustle.

yosef123 2 years ago | |

For anyone looking for a simple markdown editor (nothing more), I would recommend Typora. It's closed source, and the plugin system is lacking, but it gets the essentials basically perfect.

oneeyedpigeon 2 years ago | | |

I used to use Typora but something put me off — I can't totally remember what. It might have been that it creates copies of files rather than saving in-place, which then screws up hard links. But it might have been something less 'niche' too!

blowski 2 years ago | | |

I'm on macOS, and I use either TextEdit or Vim. The problem isn't Obsidian itself, but the ecosystem in which it exists.

dSebastien 2 years ago | |

I have published a free guide: https://www.dsebastien.net/the-ultimate-beginners-guide-to-o...

I also have a course: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-course

And a starting point with a preconfigured vault and a user guide: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit

blowski 2 years ago |

I love Obsidian - its approach, the ecosystem, and the implementation.

But... I can't help but feel it will become the latest application to either pivot to something unpalatable (probably after being acquired) or become abandonware, leaving me to move to Yet Another Tool. And so it prevents me from really investing in any of it - I just use a no-frills text editor.

Brajeshwar 2 years ago |

As in the other comments here, I use Obsidian but avoid making it tightly coupled with my workflows. I like the fact that I can walk away when needed.

I used reminders a lot earlier, but I have stopped using them these days. I continue to use Calendars and Notes. Between the two, the need for reminders has gone from my workflow. If I need reminding and have a date/time, it is calendared. If I need a Checklist (Shopping), it is in a Note or part of a Note (e.g., Shared Shopping List with your partner).

marcuskaz 2 years ago |

Thank you, an excellent tool and works well so far. It was a nice easy setup, you already convinced me to purchase the lifetime pro to say thanks. Gotta support indie developers in an ecosystem I use.

A minor bug I noticed, you don't have media controls on the demo video on your website. I had to right-click and select play, clicking the video didn't start it either.

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Thank you, it really means a lot! The video should autoplay so I hid the controls; I'll add them back though as I guess autoplay is flakey.

Improvotter 2 years ago |

Is it possible to introduce a trial? I'd want to make sure that the features work as described and am curious how smooth this works when not using your Macbook often. Like whether it will sync them in the background when the laptop is closed. Should I simply buy and go for a refund via Apple if it doesn't work out? Though I feel like this might be worse for you.

Tried it out just now as a free user and it synced thousands of completed reminders as `- [x] ...` for each. It's hard to make the jump to pay for this when I cannot test it out fully.

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Hi, thanks for the feedback. I believe the free version should be representative as a trial and also useful without upgrading. If you would like to try premium please email and I can add you to the test flight.

I designed the App to be running all the time on my MacBook as that is where I use Obsidian; during my usage I have observed syncing working with my machine plugged in and display closed. This should be possible to test yourself with the free 6 hour sync interval.

For the issue you mentioned, by any chance did you select an existing list or create a new empty list? If selecting an existing reminder list completed Reminders will be synced to the inbox. It was an untested flow, but I think it’s correct as the program ensures the list state is synced to the vault state. I believe the setup wizard recommends creating a new list, I will add a note that completed reminders will be added to your vault if you select an existing list.

superultra 2 years ago |

This is really the missing puzzle piece for my Obsidian setup, and therefore was an insta-buy.

However important recomemndation though: I selected "enable syncing" in the onboard process and your app proceeded to sync every single task from my entire vault. I am watching the number climb into the hundreds. There should be some kind of warning that this will happen, and/or some way to filter which tasks sync (ie: tags, or tasks in a specific note).

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Hi, version 1.1.0 just shipped that added an option to specify a Global Filter similar to the Task Plugin global filter, so if configured only Tasks containing the filter text will be included; once configured you might wish to click Clear Cache to remove all the existing reminders and re-scan your Vault. Hope it solves your issue!

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Thank you, this is the second request I had for filtering so I will add it.

InTheArena 2 years ago |

I wrote my own version of this - but ended up abandoning it for todoist. What I care about is that Obsidian is my “point of service” for all of my daily notes - but the actual management of todos seems better outside of the tool, rather then inside. As long as I can quickly and easily create tasks in notes, and display them in the correct output, using todoist to mange the backend seems reasonable to me.

shmoogy 2 years ago | |

Is there a way to sync obsidian notes to todoist? I've been using this app on TestFlight and forcing myself to use Apple reminders. I like that I can add reminders via Siri if I'm away from a computer, and sync tasks throughout my day from meetings or other things... but I don't like reminders kanban, and some of the data embed options in it. Feels too bare bones

ppetty 2 years ago |

Hi @rahilb, this sounds very intriguing; but I have a question regarding the In-App Purchases: what do these do? Is the app a trial that eventually requires a subscription or lifetime purchase?

I think what Obsidian with recent changes to their sorage sync fees is actually brilliant. I paid $8/month for 50GB, then they dropped the storage to 10GB. So I’m getting a great deal for the same $8 compared to new users & now they have a very low-grade $4/moonth plan that probably works for a lot of people … maybe even me. But going from 50GB to 1GB for half teh cost has me locked in to an extent.

That said $9/year doesn’t seem crazy for this one feature but I’m reluctant to install this without knowing this in advance. Still surprised Apple doesn’t require these details upfront … but these details aren’t in the app store or site as far as I can tell.

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Hi, the free version should be sufficient for most users; once installed and configured it provides:

- syncing of vault tasks to reminders (once every six hours)

- completion of vault tasks in reminders (immediately when the app is running)

- creation of tasks from reminders (also immediate while running)

- manual syncing whenever you want (click a button to sync vault tasks to reminders if you don’t want to wait for the automatic sync)

If you purchase, you get access to the following nice to have features:

- faster sync intervals (I.e. your vault is checked automatically for new tasks up to every minute)

- deletion sync: if you delete a Reminder the associated Task is deleted from the vault (immediately)

- descriptions for Reminders: the reminder description includes the note name from Obsidian; soon this will also include any child elements of the task.

- ability to only sync tasks with a due date

Like I said the free version should still be useful for most people. Once installed there is also a description of premium features on the purchase screen.

I’ll add these to the App Store description; thanks for the feedback!

awestley 2 years ago |

Many apps lack a good means of triggering "reminders" on iOS and MacOs. Apple seems to keep the secret sauce to themselves. 3rd party apps just miss the mark IMO. However, the reminders app itself leave a lot to be desired. So something like this that ties a great app into what the native apps reminders is a great idea. Thank you for sharing!

aramndrt 2 years ago | |

What features is the Reminders app missing? I switched from Things to Reminders and didn't notice any missing features. Not doubting your statement - I'm genuinely curious to know what functionality might be lacking in Reminders that I'm unaware of.

orhmeh09 2 years ago | | |

Persistent reminders. TickTick's implementation is good.

CharlesW 2 years ago | |

> Many apps lack a good means of triggering "reminders" on iOS and MacOs. Apple seems to keep the secret sauce to themselves.

Apple built developers an entire framework dedicated to this, which works on both iOS and macOS. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/eventkit

captn3m0 2 years ago | |

I run my own CardSAV/CalDAV server but as long as you have a DAV server (Fastmail gives one for eg), Reminders will happily sync against it.

I use it to sync my reminders/contacts/calendars across Thunderbird/Linux and iOS.

I can edit/update/delete items programmatically with ease without any Apple secret sauce.

jwells89 2 years ago | | |

This is probably one of the best yet most underrated features of the various stock Apple organizational apps: they work just as well as vendor agnostic clients for standard protocols (IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, etc) with relatively little favoring of first-party services.

I wish this were more common, but instead it’s more typical to see things like the vendor agnostic Windows Mail being abandoned for “new” Outlook which is much pushier about using MS services.

awestley 2 years ago | | |

That sound like a fun project to try out. I may try that out. Thanks.

greggsy 2 years ago | |

Shortcuts app has just enough support to manage reminders, but automation triggers are fairly limited.

awestley 2 years ago | | |

I haven't had great luck with shortcut reminders. I always feel like there are cases it didn't trigger, then I don't trust it.

ripperdoc 2 years ago |

I wish there was a way to syn from Apple Notes to Obsidian (or maybe there is?) Apple Notes is just faster and more convenient for daily notes, but I want Obsidian to be my repository, so I want some mechanism of automatically syncing certain notes or importing at some intervals.

Terretta 2 years ago | |

Either, export your Apple Notes as Markdown:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12

Or use the official Importer:

https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes

Btw, Shortcuts can slam things into your Obsidian vault because it's just text files. That can be as fast or faster than Notes. You might need a shortcuts helper like Toolbox Pro that can remember a path to your vault and write to it from your shortcuts:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-pro-for-shortcuts/id14...

greggsy 2 years ago |

Interesting. I’ve found ReminderCal’s approach to synching with the Calendar pretty novel and foolproof (basically use an action in Shortcuts to sync it it across when you close Reminders), and I’d be interested to know how your works.

That said, I’ve had many, many false starts with Obsidian, and I don’t think this is enough to tilt my workflows towards it again. The Apple Notes importer does not work with images or drawings, which kind of makes the thought of transitioning kind of moot.

Also, I can’t be trusted to not fiddle around as soon as I open my vault. Notes is much less customisable, but this is a wind for consistency and ‘stability’ when I open it up to actually take notes.

podviaznikov 2 years ago |

Very cool. Reminders is one of those Apple Apps that has proper API. So anyone can integrate with it.

I've build two apps on top of it: 1. macOS habits tracker https://apps.apple.com/us/app/alto-computer/id6478018751?mt=... 2. small web app to publish my daily habits online https://public.me/anton/daily

tuckerman 2 years ago |

Thank you! This was something I was desperately looking for when I started using Obsidian. Already paid for the lifetime license :)

It's unclear to me what happens if I run this on multiple machines. I have a few different machines that I use throughout the day but none are on "24/7" so I'd love to install this everywhere so it's always syncing. I'd love for that to be possible but I think either way it might be useful to document whether I can/shouldn't do that :)

rahilb 2 years ago | |

That case is definitely undefined behaviour right now; if I had to guess it would result in duplicates at the moment. I’ll work on supporting it but for now I don’t recommend it!

tuckerman 2 years ago | | |

Makes sense, consensus is tricky and a weird use case I know. Thanks!

gbraad 2 years ago |

I love Obsidian, but mostly use a filter (dataview) to deal with my tasks and overview. Most of the time on Windows and Linux. I do not use my macBook a lot. Only for testing the application we work on, so not very familiar with Reminders, though I like the idea. How do you properly link them up as they might go out of sync (loose relation) if one of the texts gets changed.

timothyduong 2 years ago |

Feedback: - It works! and really easily too! Thank you - Things I wish it could do: Sync based on #tag #metadata. I use 'Checklist' obsidian plugin and there's check-boxes that I throw in and there's 'checklist' items with tag name (e.g., #TODO) that I use to actually collate things that are to-be-done.

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Hi, glad you like it!

Version 1.1.0 just shipped that allows you to specify a Global Filter; only Tasks containing the filter will be synced if that's what you're after? Or would you like to exclude notes from being included based on properties at the beginning of the document?

timothyduong 2 years ago | | |

Hi Rahil, yep, just as you said! Thank you! I'm waiting for the update to sync into the App Store to test this.

sbukin 2 years ago |

Is anyone else experiencing issues with off-by-one dates? If I set a date of 2024-03-20 on an Obsidian task (today), I'm getting a Reminder out the other side with a due date of 2024-03-19 (yesterday).

Side note: it looks like the support email (remindersyncturquoisehexagon.co.uk) is malformed? Gmail is refusing to send emails to it.

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Hi, the email should be remindersync@turquoisehexagon.co.uk please let me know the issue you’re facing!

gizmo 2 years ago |

How does this sync the other way? If you delete or complete a reminder or change the description do you get duplicates or do your changes get clobbered? What about conflicts? Does it matter if you make the changes in obsidian or reminders?

I guess I'm asking how fragile this is in practice.

rahilb 2 years ago | |

- Deleting a Task in Obsidian that has been synced to Reminders deletes the Reminder

- Deleting a Reminder that has been synced to Obisidian deletes the Task from Obsidian (if enabled in the settings menu)

- Completing a synced task in Obsidian will complete the Reminder (on the next sync)

- Completing a synced Reminder will complete the Task in Obsidian (immediately if the app is running)

- Creating a Reminder in the synced list creates a task in a note called "Reminder Sync Inbox.md"

- Editing a Task in Obsidian and syncing deletes the previously associated Reminder and creates a new one (effectively updating the text in Reminders.app)

The only known limitation (so far) is:

- Editing a synced Reminder description in Reminders.app does not update the text of the Task in Obsidian: This is hard to solve as the original Task may contain embedded links (which are stripped to just the link text for the Reminder description). Syncing those edits back to Markdown is a difficult problem that I haven't bothered focused on yet as I feel it may not be solvable.

In case of a conflict, the state in Obsidian always wins :)

master-lincoln 2 years ago |

Was it difficult to build? I'd like syncing with other task/reminder providers from Obsidian

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Difficulty is of course subjective; I have 10+ years of functional programming experience but was completely new to Swift; the core functionality took less than a week of 4ish hours a day. Apple's EventKit API is very developer friendly and Markdown is a well known format so that made things easier. I'm not a frontend / UI tradie so spent another few days learning SwiftUI & making things look quality (and TBH I think that quality is not where I want it to be). So to answer your question... not really?

pablostarter 2 years ago |

I would love to have exactly this but for Omnifocus! I currently do it with Shortcuts but is limited to one way sync which is very inconvenient. Having the task in context on Obsiadian but also nicely organized and actionable in a task manager is great.

trimbo 2 years ago |

Excellent, I was just thinking about something like this a couple of weeks ago.

> "Turquoise Hexagon Cybernetics"

Nice homage to Boards of Canada!

rahilb 2 years ago | |

BoC Maxima!

schwuk 2 years ago |

Would love to see you add support for Logseq!

orsenthil 2 years ago |

Is there an Apple Tasks app (or compatible app) for Android?

paperpunk 2 years ago |

Works great. Now just make it sync with JIRA too.

2dvisio 2 years ago |

Is this also available via dmg offline install?

rahilb 2 years ago | |

Unfortunately it's App Store only right now.

theappsecguy 2 years ago |

Used obsidian for a while but had too many pains with it. Eventually migrated to SuperNotes and couldn’t be happier.

DavideNL 2 years ago | |

> "Currently data is not end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) on the platform, but this is something we hope to offer in the future."

https://supernotes.app/faq/

Shame...

pwillia7 2 years ago |

Why does no one use Logseq? I prefer it to Obsidian after using both

berkeleynerd 2 years ago | |

I use LogSeq with the TODO plugin giving me a sidebar view of outstanding TODOs. It would be wonderful to have a similar plugin for LogSeq but of course the onus is on me to make that happen. If someone were working on such an integration I would gladly support it via Patreon or open collective, etc…

PurpleRamen 2 years ago | |

It's confusing. I tried it a few time, but never really got into it. It seems very opinionated into what it offers and seems to force you into a workflow. Obsidian is more liberate and flexible in that regard.

grandma_tea 2 years ago | |

I wanted to like Logseq, but I couldn't stand how opinionated it is about the format of my notes. Also, at least on Ubuntu 22, there was a noticeable delay when interacting with any UI element.

pwillia7 2 years ago | | |

Interesting -- I like the bullets and the 'restrictiveness'