Due : A Wonderful New App To Manage Your To-Do List

Being a very forgetful person, I depend on reminders and timers to tell me everything, from wishing my mom on her birthday, to putting the milk in the refrigerator every morning. So you shouldn’t be surprised when I tell you I have tried tens of Reminder Apps to help me survive my day to day tasks. But all apps, I have found, have some limitation or the other, so you can’t really rely on them too much. They may be awesome, but they are never as great as a human personal assistant to remind you about everything and nag you into doing them, and I’m still waiting for the day I can afford one of those.

Jokes apart, I recently discovered an amazing new app for Apple, that comes pretty close to being a living personal assistant when it comes to reminding you about stuff that needs to be done. It’s called Due, and it is available for both Mac computers as well as iOS devices like iPhones or iPads.

Due is priced at a little less than ten dollars for Mac and a little less than five dollars for iOS. That is the beauty of this app, you don’t need a smart phone to be able to use it, even your Mac will do. This is particularly helpful for those of us who spend most of their day on the computer. The features for the phone app and the computer app vary in minor degrees, but they are both awesome.

One great part of this app is that it has a natural language interface, which means you do not have to specify a date or a time on a calendar to create your reminder; you can write it in the same way you would write it on a to-do list. For example, you could write “Get hair curled this Saturday” or “Take dad to dentist on June fifth”, or even “Buy groceries on the 12^th ”. The app automatically identifies the date you mentioned in the reminder and parses it accordingly. However, this is an automatic feature only in the computer app, on your mobile you will have to activate parsing by tapping a tiny button.

There are also four button you can configure and set to Quick Access, that is, you can set the text on these without having to set the date and time.

Another very useful feature, particularly if you are, like me, a procrastinator, is the delay option. Like the snooze button on your alarm clock lets you push back the reminder to a later time. It could be a minute later, an hour later, or a month later. There are quick icons on the alarm screen that let you choose how far you want to push your reminder, with a single tap.

Wonderfully, this is one app that does not display you to-do list in a calendar, rather you get a list. I prefer a list to a calendar any day because I like seeing all the stuff I need to do one after the other vertically. Also, completed reminders are not trashed but are stored in the archives and may be revered at any minute.

Other amazing features include the countdown timer, which can really be helpful in the gym, or wherever you are trying to time yourself. The sharing option, though not available on the computer version, lets you share your to-do list with others.

Over all, a very helpful app, and worth every penny!