Due – Reminders & Timers
An effective way to nag yourself
£4.99, offers in-app purchases FROM Due Apps, dueapp.com needs iOS 10.3 or later
Due reminds you to do things. There are features built in to iOS for the same purpose but, understandably, you may find they don’t quite hit
the mark. Timers (in Clock) notoriously allows only one item at once. Reminders, which works across iOS and macOS, isn’t the most intuitive app to use, and when a reminder occurs it just pops up a notification that is all too easy to dismiss when busy.
Due makes it easy to set a reminder and hard to ignore it. The main All Reminders screen starts up with a couple of useful examples to show you how to flick an item leftwards to mark it done, or swipe it firmly off the side of the screen to delete it entirely. In Settings, from the menu at the top left, you can adjust these gestures.
Add your own items and they’ll get listed under subheadings: Overdue, Today, and Next 7 Days. It’s the way you set them up that distinguishes Due from other to-do apps. Although you can tap the date to use the standard iOS rolling date picker, the default input method is Quick Access Times. This is a matrix of preset times and options to add or subtract minutes or days. At first it’s infuriatingly limiting, but when you realise you can customise everything in Settings, it makes sense as a shortcut.
Quick time
New to Due 3 (a £2.99 upgrade if you’re a previous user) is the ability to use Quick Access Times from notifications, activated by turning on Settings > Notification Snooze > Custom Snooze. So when you receive a reminder, you can swipe left, tap View, then quickly tell Due when to remind you again. If you don’t, it’ll Auto Snooze for five minutes and then keep reminding you again until you mark the item completed. Simple but effective.
Unfortunately, Due suffers a little from not being a built-in iOS feature. New items sync between devices (Watch is supported, and there’s a Mac version at £9.99), but when you don’t have the app open, this relies on Background App Refresh and it doesn’t always work instantly. You can import items from Reminders, but using both gets messy, and only Reminders supports geolocation, sharing, and creating items using Siri.
The app’s Timers page supports multiple timers and saves them for reuse. You don’t get the same snooze flexibility with timers, though. Ultimately, we can’t help feeling reminders, timers, alarms and calendar events should all work together. For the time being, Due is a simple way to remember everyday tasks that gets easier the more you sink your teeth into it.