I have been playing with the app Due on iOS and OSX. It’s a good “to do list” app that lets you record when you want reminders for whatever reason. I’m using it because I can’t trust iOS and OSX Calendar and it gets cluttered with boring “Buy Milk” reminders. It’s _slightly_ idiosyncratic.

The OSX application allows you to click on the days you want a repeating alert to sound. Four nights a week Mr12 finishes at the normal time and one night is late. It’s easy to enter this in the OSX application but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it in iOS, even on an iPad because it shows dates on the usual iOS poker machine reels.

There appears to be a few little bugs. The settings for the alert sounds seem to bounce around a bit at first. I set one which worked but the other one changed immediate afterwards. It all seems stable now so I’m guessing they used uninitialised variables!

I had previously purchased version 1 of the app. For some reason buying the app for AUD$12.99 still left me needing to pay another $3.79 for an in-app purchase for “Upgrade from 1.0”. Yes, I clicked Restore In-App Purchases and no, that didn’t work. Your experience may vary.

I needed the upgrade because I wanted access to Dropbox syncing.

Using Dropbox it can sync in the background.

Using iCloud you have to open the app on each device and then it will sync.

Yes, Apple really know how to cripple tools that might compete with what they have decided is fundamental functionality.

The Due apps are meant to have good natural language parsing for dates and they show it in their promotional videos but typing something like “Noon on the Third Thursday of the Month” doesn’t work for me. It’s easy enough to enter manually but only parsing “Next Thursday” or a long form date is just lame.

Is it worth nearly $20? I’m satisfied with it and it appears to work so far. It syncs in the background and it has a nice simple interface. It is NOT OmniFocus or Evernote and that’s fine because I already have them for keeping track of project work.

Due is a great way of reminding yourself every Friday morning to put the bins out.