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.
Great idea and good start, Rahil. You’ve set a pretty high bar for yourself, and it looks to me it’s not quite ready for prime time. E.g. I’m not getting 2-way sync on edits, only one-way from Obsidian, and then date changes only sync when the task is updated. No subtasks or tags. I think you need at least the latter for this to be very useful.
Syncing anything is hard because of breaks/conflicts, on top of having to track tasks among potentially hundreds of files–sounds like a headache to me, and if you can pull it off you’ll be a hero. I humbly suggest you call it beta and remove the paid tier for now, add it back in when ready.
I’m definitely trying to solve the problem of editing in Reminders editing the Vault task however this is difficult as the vault task may contain links which are currently stripped to text for the Reminder description. In general I believe Obsidian should be the source of truth and the program behaviour reflects that right now. Perhaps I can add this as an option with the caveat that it cannot work with tasks with markdown hyperlinks.
Syncing due date changes from Reminders to Obsidian (and back) is possible and I’ll add that.
The EventKit API does not allow setting of the tags field you see in Reminders.app. The next feature is adding to the generate description feature the option to include child elements of the list item (likely context).
Subtasks (i.e. un ordered list children of un ordered lists) should be imported as separate Reminders, there’s no concept of Sub-Reminders so I’m not sure what is the expected behaviour here? Is it that completing a parent task should complete the child tasks?
Editing in Reminders: I understand the difficulty. In thinking workflow, I think if you could get date changes 2-way it will be fine for a user’s workflow. It would be clumsy to be looking at Reminders, then need to jump to Obsidian in order to, say, postpone something.
Tags: hmm that’s too bad that you can’t add those. How are you thinking that users would organize Reminders? One of my Macs is older so I don’t use the latest functionality. GoodTask, using the Reminders db, does create smart lists using any text in task name or description.
