Apple’s Calendar notifications are a trash fire

Apple’s Calendar has gotten worse and worse in the last two or three operating-system releases.

I had three reminders/appointments this morning at 09:00. They all popped up five minutes before nine, as desired.

I told them all to go away for an hour.

They all popped up again, at nine. One of them popped up twice.

I then told them all to go away forever, in a fit of rage.

Now, I just changed the reminder for one of these appointments to “Alert at time of event”.

It promptly popped up at 09:03 as soon as I hit OK.

This is not good. This is arbitrary and terrible.

On another of my events, I somehow have the following:

• Alert Today at 09:00
• Alert 16 seconds before start
• Alert 5 minutes before start (default)
• Alert Today at 09:00

How can this be? I didn’t program this. This is obviously an upgrade mess.

You can delay a notification for only a maximum of one hour. You used to be able to delay by a day or a week. You used to be able to make the reminders work the way you want rather than they way Apple wants.

As far as I can tell, I can’t use the Calendar or Reminders app to create nudging notifications that don’t irritate me beyond all reason.

This feature is useless for tracking a task for which you want to create a nudging reminder that you can drag along for a few days. It’s just irritating.

For example, say I want to be reminded to update my resumé once per quarter. I don’t want to do it exactly on that day, but I want to be reminded and that I should do it within a bandwidth of days. This is not the tool for that.

Neither is the Reminders app, actually. There, you would have to reprogram the reminder date manually if you want to delay by more than an hour. It does stop reminding you and nagging you every hour, but it also stops reminding you entirely, rather than allowing you to easily tell it when you’d like another reminder. The badge does remain on the Reminders app, which is better than nothing, but it’s still not what I want—and what I used to have before Apple started drastically reducing the functionality of Reminders and Calendar.

My recent experience with Outlook is that the tasks there are much more flexible than this. They allow delays of a day, a week, or “custom”. You can easily program these days with a single mouse click without having to navigate a whole dialog of options.