10 ms·

Google Calendar and Assistant Reminders Will Migrate to Google Tasks Soon

122 points by e2e4 3y ago

patrickdavey 3y ago
How about a task you could pin to the top of your gmail. Maybe call it "Inbox". That'd be super handy rather than having to go to a different app to manage your tasks.
- topicseed 3y ago
  Use the Gmail sidebar (on the right)? You have Cal/Tasks/Contacts widgets and it's handy
  - andybak 3y ago
    You are replying to a comment that was sarcastically referring to an excellent feature in a product that Google "retired": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      Because they moved the features to Gmail and the app hub.
      - andybak 3y ago
        Not completely. Inbox bundles and few other of the best aspects never made it across. I know because I had a painful period of adjustment when Inbox shut down.
- gregjw 3y ago
  lol
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  I'm still really bitter about the botched migration from inbox reminders when they shut it down.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  Love that Google calendar does this
- alexilliamson 3y ago
  Still really bitter about Inbox shutting down. It was really good!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
topicseed 3y ago
Finally. The Reminder, Tasks, and Calendar experience was all over the place for now a couple of years. Assistants creating one when you wanted the other didn't help either.
- kmac_ 3y ago
  Well, it will be still fragmented, Keep has it's own reminders.
- aaronharnly 3y ago
  And don’t forget the mess that is “assigning” comments in Google Docs. Try finding a single queue to work from of all of your assigned comments.
xiwenc 3y ago
Not related to google but for my personal workflow i like to manage my tasks in Apple Reminders apps and see them in one unified view in my Apple Calendar apps. Details can be read and implemented following: https://cinaq.com/blog/2022/11/22/the-missing-link-between-reminders-and-calendar-app-on-ios/ https://cinaq.com/blog/2022/11/22/the-missing-link-between-r... Just yesterday someone out of nowhere contacted me while he was trying out my setup. He loved it. Hope this helps others here on HN.
- submeta 3y ago
  BusyCal shows both calendars and Apple Reminders items, and it’s way more sophisticated (different calendar views and filters, for work and private, for projects, etc). Love the app, on iOS and Mac. Because it’s got a more sophisticated view on my Reminders. In today‘s view it‘ll group the reminders based on the list or other aspects.
  - greggsy 3y ago
    I’m still a bit salty that BusyCal and Fantastical moved to subscription, models, and failed to do any further innovation.
    - submeta 3y ago
      BusyCal is a one time payment. No subscription there.
- criddell 3y ago
  Your article is good but the callouts are barely readable on my iPad which is in dark mode and fairly dim because I’m reading in a dark room. A little more contrast would help a lot. At the end you mention the lack of timer based triggers. You can do this with Shortcut personal automations. For example, I have a WFH focus mode. I run an automation at 8am on weekdays that checks if I’m at home and if I am, it turns on WFH mode until late afternoon. My problem with your setup is that it doesn’t update the events when I modify or complete the reminders.
not_knuth 3y ago
I'm still waiting for Google tasks to be able to have a duration so that I can visualize the time commitment in my calendar. I can't believe this isn't a feature yet... Having a "planned" date, where the task visually appears in my calendar, as well as a separate due date would be great too.
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  The most useful thing that's missing from pretty much any tasking system is suspense date: at what point is it chalked up as a fail and life moves on? This is the date most senior leaders in my org use the most. It is the coin of the realm. The second most useful thing is the warning notice. If someone could reliably figure out how many hours/days/weeks heads-up people are going to need to execute before suspense, that would be amazing. But it's very hard for someone without visibility on your own workload to estimate that. If you're buried under a global crisis, sure people will cut you some slack on your HR actions, but you can bet they'll hold you accountable for budget. An executive assistant can make their career if they can make accurate warning notices for their boss.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    That's why I like having my todos in Notion I can filter all todos with a date more than x days passed into a missed view.
lawik 3y ago
Are they goong to break the most important Google app for me? This is .. exciting. My calendar events are not tasks. The reminders for them are not tasks either. So this is worrying for me.
- brap 3y ago
  None of these things are being migrated
  - Spivak 3y ago
    The second one sure looks like it is.
    - hannasanarion 3y ago
      No, reminders are a separate type of item that can go on your google calendar, different from an event, not related to upcoming event notifications. You can tell it's a reminder because it has a finger knot icon and keeps rolls over to the next day unless you click "done" on it.
stuaxo 3y ago
As long as it still pops up reminders on my phone I don't really care what it's called. Still - renaming stuff can be annoying, they renamed google pay to wallet and I only found out when I went to pay for something and it wasn't there.
- bitshiftfaced 3y ago
  A couple of years ago, I tried migrating all of my reminders to Tasks. I can't remember why exactly, but for some reason I immediately had to go back to calendar reminders. There was some functionality that worked differently, but I can't remember what exactly. It might've been something about how calendar reminders persist in the taskbar until you click them away, and I need that in particular.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
Any good sugestions of calendar alternatives in the Android space?
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  Second
- arkitaip 3y ago
  Fastmail has a pretty good calendar when you get subscribe for email. My main complaint is who don't use embedded calendar links and instead send you .ics files or force you to use Google Calendar.
  - naavis 3y ago
    It's otherwise good, but the Fastmail calendar sadly doesn't have an Android widget, nor can you create reminders like in Google Calendar. You can only create events. I migrated emails to Fastmail a few years ago, but have been holding on to Google Calendar.
    - natejlong 3y ago
      This setup works well for making any calendar host (fastmail, nextcloud, anything with caldav) work identically to native Google Calendar: > Android does not support CalDAV natively, however you can easily add support by installing a CalDAV sync adapter. We have tested and recommend DAVx⁵, which is approximately $5. Once you have added your account in DAVx⁵, you can use the native Android calendar or any other calendar app and the changes will sync with Fastmail. https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279881-Set-up-Fastmail-on-Android#calendar https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279881-Se... It also covers contacts integration too!
  - mkl 3y ago
    I'm just experimenting with this. Is there a way to make the week view scroll a week at a time instead of a day? Is there a way to duplicate an event?
javajosh 3y ago
I have a suggestion for Google: make an interactive graphical mind map representation of your products and shows relationships between them. Have that be the response to google.com/products. Add layers, like for a map, that show old and new names, and proposed names. Make an attempt to identity the product-neutral set of "degrees of freedom" that each product gives the user. This would be a fun, stand-alone project for an intern. Maybe use D3 or processing.js for the front-end. Such an artifact would be useful to users and Google leadership alike.
- Eumenes 3y ago
  They must no doubt have this internally
  - killjoywashere 3y ago
    Wasn't it like 10 years ago that they had a 3B line monorepo for the entire org? Does g3 still have a stranglehold on the org?
    - Arbortheus 3y ago
      Google still famously uses a monorepo. With lots of heavy set-built tooling, their own variant of Bazel for builds, it works well. I imagine a lot of engineering effort goes into making it work.
  - cloudking 3y ago
    Yes, it hasn't been released because they are still trying to figure it out
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rolisz 3y ago
  For an intern? You mean it would be a PhD thesis in and of itself. Google has had more than 18 chat apps, some of which had the same name... At the same time, but couldn't talk to each other .
godzillabrennus 3y ago
Maybe they could pull their heads out of their rears and put Google Duplex on iPhone? Seems like a 7 year old tech still beats Siri and could have a halo effect for android but most Americans have iPhones and can’t use it.
jeffparsons 3y ago
On my Google phone, if I try to edit a reminder through the GUI, it refuses to show me a screen to edit the reminder. Instead, it spends several seconds loading the voice assistant, which then eventually asks aloud what I would like to change. It's been like that ever since they started pushing the assistant stuff harder, whenever that was. If they've fixed that, then I'll be happy. I never did like my phone suddenly yelling at me in otherwise quiet places.
- oblio 3y ago
  Google Maps has an auto mode on Android. Well, if you set a destination and start the trip, it shows a big X button at the bottom, to stop the trip. Guess what loads slowly and goes in the location of the big X button? You guessed right, the Google voice assistant, which I don't use. They're really pushing the voice assistant.
  - Already__Taken 3y ago
    the voice assistant keeps thinking my podcast is talking to it
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    The problem is the voice assistant doesn't work the way you want it to work which is like star trek. But the reason the computer works in star trek is because it's either a) a hyper intelligent ai that automates the ship so people can go about more interesting activities such as exploring the Galaxy or b) it's a storytelling tool that enters the script whenever a boring thing for the characters to do comes up so they can get back to pushing the story along. Neither of those are really accessible to us today. But that doesn't stop people from wishing they were.
    - csydas 3y ago
      I'm not sure we're actually that far off technically from getting the _kind_ of automation that Star Trek computer can do, we're just trying to get our voice assistants to do a ton of other crap that the Star Trek computer doesn't have to worry about on the business level. Star Trek computer has no idea about advertisements/search optimization, etc, it's more like a helpful shell/magic talking box in most cases. If the Star Trek doesn't understand the request or can't complete it as requested, it prompts the user for more details or parameters and lets you know what you didn't give it. Similarly, the way we see interactions with the computer in TNG is that you define a task for the computer and the computer further defines business rules until it can start a workflow. It's not trying to push you towards a specific source of information or a specific outcome, it's just trying to define the rules to take your input and get the desired output. AI-based control systems like this need to be established like we'd have a library or framework or protocol first, something that is just built for accomplishing tasks and refining that to a point that it is a workhorse. When it comes to subjective matters, it needs to not try to build a profile on what you want and predict it, it needs to be painfully obtuse in its objectivity. Even on Star Trek, the computer struggled with matters of personal taste/entertainment even though it could ingest complex technical requirements and write equally or more complex workflows/code on the fly for specific tasks. It was pretty often with things like the holodeck or even just playing music/games to pass the time the computer didn't understand what the requestor meant and even though it produced an output, the output had to be refined a lot in fairly specific terms. Even something like shopping was still pretty manual, just piecing through a catalog of items to replicate was seen many times. The point is that the Star Trek computer was optimized for specific workloads and shined there, and stayed out of the way for absolutely everything else. I'm don't have hope that modern tech companies have the discipline to design something like this. AI and smart homes I think lack a lot of focus and polish, trying to be way too much at once and also return further revenue for the businesses with ad-tech; I don't have any hope that modern tech companies are going to be the smart-home revolution as much as FOSS will, but that of course has the chicken and egg problem of finding hardware that will actually work with FOSS smart-homes; I'll gladly side with Stallman on this one and position that if the entire stack was truly free, then we would see innovation and closer to Star Trek style smart homes since you could buy any smart-object and just run free software on it that meets your needs. But I don't have hope that any tech company has a desire or interest in this, and personally I cannot get invested in anything from the major tech companies as it's just going to be obsolete in a few years and the services will stop working; Google has demonstrated this with far too many projects, and even Apple struggles to get its smart-object integrations to stick (I think one of the major car manufacturers dropped CarPlay for their new vehicles going forward?) It's hard for me to be excited or interested in smart-anything as I don't have the confidence I can rely on it for more than a year or two.
xnx 3y ago
This is a good thing. Google is rightly criticized for having overlapping/duplicate functionally in their services. This is an example of them slowly/responsibly combining some.
- oefrha 3y ago
  This is good only if the replacement/combined product isn't inferior and important features don't get lost in the process. I've been burned multiple times already.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  By adding a whole separate app to juggle?
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Part of consolidation would be ensuring migration from the old to the new. Something which Google is not attempting to do here.
anothernewdude 3y ago
The worst UI is one that changes unexpectedly.
edandersen 3y ago
"Reminders created in Keep will not be migrated to Tasks — they will still be available in Keep, but they will no longer be displayed in Google Calendar once the migration is complete." So they didn't finish the User Story?
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Instead of cancelling products and getting bad reputation for it, is Google now quiet quitting their products?
- nkrisc 3y ago
  As a user, I want my reminders on Google Keep to be migrated to Google tasks so that I can experience the benefits of reduced maintenance, development, and improved product experience from a more cohesive and consolidated product strategy.
  - cobertos 3y ago
    As a user, I would like to get off this wild ride and have my products work as intended.
- indymike 3y ago
  This is a huge failure. Google Keep was really, really good.
- SloopJon 3y ago
  Damn it! I forget why I started using Keep reminders in the first place, but that's where I put all my bill reminders, including annual and semi-annual premiums. It is beyond a cliche at this point that Google unceremoniously dumps products and features (RIP Reader and Bookmarks), but when you're creating "a single experience for managing to-dos across Google," why, oh why, wouldn't you migrate reminders from Keep? Did they forget about it until too late?
  - htrp 3y ago
    Different team in a different org.
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
Does anyone know why I would've stopped getting a daily google calendar reminder on February 21st? This is a bit before the rollover for personal accounts. It was to take pills that I need to take daily, and I think I missed several doses (not consecutively, I often remember without the email) before I realized that the email was gone, which is pretty frightening.
- andyjih_ 3y ago
  I’m still getting mine. Might be worth checking spam?
  - RheingoldRiver 3y ago
    Definitely not going to spam, but thanks for the suggestion. Since you said you're getting them, I'll try recreating the reminder and see what happens.
mkl 3y ago
I'm interested in people's experiences switching from Google Calendar to Fastmail Calendar. Is Fastmail a good replacement? It sounds like basic calendar events will be unchanged by this (though I'm not completely clear on that), but Google Calendar is the only Google service I'm using regularly and I wouldn't mind getting off it.
nashashmi 3y ago
We're missing a task synchronization server. we already have a Calendar synchronization server.
nixpulvis 3y ago
I guess this shows how cynical I am, but this title really confused me. Here I was thinking Google was going to do away with their calendar. I mean, if it meant that they started working on interop features and standards again maybe I'd be excited...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
binkHN 3y ago
I did this migration on my phone and it broke reminder creation on my Google smart speakers. Only works on my phone now.
suddenclarity 3y ago
I'm not really sure if reminders are different from events. I get an email the day before any repeating birthday I've added to my Google Calendar. Will this functionality be impacted of this change? The blog post does a poor job explaining how it works today and what will change.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Reminders are the reminder part without an event. They don't have a fixed time/duration, they have a start time and duration, and they float until marked completed or deletes.
martyvis 3y ago
I installed the Tasks app on my Pixel. I saw my reminders were all in My Tasks. I easily created anew list. I cannot see how I can move a task from the default bucket My Tasks to my new list. Am I missing something?
indymike 3y ago
Honestly, this just creates opportunities for people to try out new products when they rage quit because some deeply buried feature in Google’s to-do feature makes their personal workflow crash.
crazygringo 3y ago
There seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion here in the comments. Calendar is not going away, calendar events are not being touched, this has nothing to do with alerts for calendar events, and this does not require you to use a new/separate app. Google has simply had different things called both "reminders" and "tasks" across apps, for legacy reasons. For a long time there's been a "reminder" object in Calendar (different from events), and then a "task" object got added as well (that shares data with the Tasks app). There's no good UX reason for these to be separate types of objects, so now "reminders" and "tasks" are being consolidated into just "tasks". But they're staying in Calendar. (And can also be edited in the Tasks app which has been around for years already.) This is good. It's simplifying. (As to why they're now splitting off reminders created in Google Keep rather than integrating them too, I don't know for sure. But I've never understood the use case of reminders in Keep at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if they deprecate that feature entirely. Keep reminders came before Tasks existed at all, but now you should just use Tasks.)
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > This is good. It's simplifying Crippling Keep is neither good nor simplifying.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    What do you use reminders for in Keep? Keep is for keeping snippets of text, notes -- I've never understood why you'd put a reminder on that. If you were using Keep as a kind of reminders/tasks list, you should switch to Tasks for that, since it's much better designed for that use case.
    - NhanH 3y ago
      Because Keep was released FIVE years before Task. And at the same rate, we are gonna have the same conversation in 5 years on why someone haven’t started using the new SuperDuperKeepTask service. From the product POV, anyone who has ever used knowledge base will tell you that you should keep everything related to your data/ info in a single app. Spreading them out by any categorization is just inviting recall issue later on.
morkalork 3y ago
Why is it that every product starts to evolve "productivity" features? Is it just a lazy way to keep juice feature release KPIs? Even my freaking keyboard app* added it. Why? So I can make tasks while making tasks?! * https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-to-do-blog/add-tasks-to-your-to-do-list-right-in-the-swiftkey-keyboard/ba-p/3143221 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-to-do-blog/...
LightBug1 3y ago
Wow ... you mean Google is acknowledging that Tasks actuallys exists?! Such a basic productivity area has languished for a decade ...
m-p-3 3y ago
Fair enough, all these systems were implemented at different times for different reason, while achieving a similar goal. Unifying them behind a single system is a good thing. I'm happy to know that my tasks and reminders generated from Google Assistant will show up at one place, and one place only. No more guessing.
butz 3y ago
Imagine how surprised I was when I found out all of my old reminders from Google Keep quietly sitting in my Google Calendar. Nobody told me about any integration and for the longest I thought they were not synced. BTW, I'm still searching for a decent offline Android TODO app.
robk 3y ago
It still drives me insane on Ios that there's no way to share to Google Tasks. For years I've asked for this simple option as my main work flow is to share from the browser to tasks for things to revisit later.
TheCleric 3y ago
Yay, can't wait until they abandon or replace this in 2 years.
telotortium 3y ago
Since it's been almost a decade, I figure I can tell this story: I was on the Calendar team at that time, and some project managers enlisted me to do some data analysis to determine if Tasks should be shut down in favor of reminders. At this time, there was no mobile app for Tasks - the only official mobile site was the basic HTML version for pre-iPhone smartphones. There were, however, several third-party mobile apps using the Tasks API. I was able to demonstrate that those apps, plus the official desktop client (inside Gmail), were responsible for a lot of monthly active users. So I guess Google has finally deduplicated by shutting down Reminders instead, which I think was the right decision. It was probably around 5 years ago or so that Google released an official Tasks mobile app.
nytesky 3y ago
Will task get its own web page and maybe support easier management thru the web, sub task, etc?

122 points by e2e4 3y ago

How about a task you could pin to the top of your gmail. Maybe call it "Inbox". That'd be super handy rather than having to go to a different app to manage your tasks.

topicseed 3y ago
Use the Gmail sidebar (on the right)? You have Cal/Tasks/Contacts widgets and it's handy
- andybak 3y ago
  You are replying to a comment that was sarcastically referring to an excellent feature in a product that Google "retired": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Because they moved the features to Gmail and the app hub.
    - andybak 3y ago
      Not completely. Inbox bundles and few other of the best aspects never made it across. I know because I had a painful period of adjustment when Inbox shut down.
gregjw 3y ago
lol
disgruntledphd2 3y ago
I'm still really bitter about the botched migration from inbox reminders when they shut it down.
hackernewds 3y ago
Love that Google calendar does this
alexilliamson 3y ago
Still really bitter about Inbox shutting down. It was really good!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

topicseed 3y ago

Finally. The Reminder, Tasks, and Calendar experience was all over the place for now a couple of years. Assistants creating one when you wanted the other didn't help either.

kmac_ 3y ago
Well, it will be still fragmented, Keep has it's own reminders.
aaronharnly 3y ago
And don’t forget the mess that is “assigning” comments in Google Docs. Try finding a single queue to work from of all of your assigned comments.

xiwenc 3y ago

Not related to google but for my personal workflow i like to manage my tasks in Apple Reminders apps and see them in one unified view in my Apple Calendar apps. Details can be read and implemented following: https://cinaq.com/blog/2022/11/22/the-missing-link-between-reminders-and-calendar-app-on-ios/ https://cinaq.com/blog/2022/11/22/the-missing-link-between-r... Just yesterday someone out of nowhere contacted me while he was trying out my setup. He loved it. Hope this helps others here on HN.

submeta 3y ago
BusyCal shows both calendars and Apple Reminders items, and it’s way more sophisticated (different calendar views and filters, for work and private, for projects, etc). Love the app, on iOS and Mac. Because it’s got a more sophisticated view on my Reminders. In today‘s view it‘ll group the reminders based on the list or other aspects.
- greggsy 3y ago
  I’m still a bit salty that BusyCal and Fantastical moved to subscription, models, and failed to do any further innovation.
  - submeta 3y ago
    BusyCal is a one time payment. No subscription there.
criddell 3y ago
Your article is good but the callouts are barely readable on my iPad which is in dark mode and fairly dim because I’m reading in a dark room. A little more contrast would help a lot. At the end you mention the lack of timer based triggers. You can do this with Shortcut personal automations. For example, I have a WFH focus mode. I run an automation at 8am on weekdays that checks if I’m at home and if I am, it turns on WFH mode until late afternoon. My problem with your setup is that it doesn’t update the events when I modify or complete the reminders.

not_knuth 3y ago

I'm still waiting for Google tasks to be able to have a duration so that I can visualize the time commitment in my calendar. I can't believe this isn't a feature yet... Having a "planned" date, where the task visually appears in my calendar, as well as a separate due date would be great too.

killjoywashere 3y ago
The most useful thing that's missing from pretty much any tasking system is suspense date: at what point is it chalked up as a fail and life moves on? This is the date most senior leaders in my org use the most. It is the coin of the realm. The second most useful thing is the warning notice. If someone could reliably figure out how many hours/days/weeks heads-up people are going to need to execute before suspense, that would be amazing. But it's very hard for someone without visibility on your own workload to estimate that. If you're buried under a global crisis, sure people will cut you some slack on your HR actions, but you can bet they'll hold you accountable for budget. An executive assistant can make their career if they can make accurate warning notices for their boss.
- Spivak 3y ago
  That's why I like having my todos in Notion I can filter all todos with a date more than x days passed into a missed view.

lawik 3y ago

Are they goong to break the most important Google app for me? This is .. exciting. My calendar events are not tasks. The reminders for them are not tasks either. So this is worrying for me.

brap 3y ago
None of these things are being migrated
- Spivak 3y ago
  The second one sure looks like it is.
  - hannasanarion 3y ago
    No, reminders are a separate type of item that can go on your google calendar, different from an event, not related to upcoming event notifications. You can tell it's a reminder because it has a finger knot icon and keeps rolls over to the next day unless you click "done" on it.

stuaxo 3y ago

As long as it still pops up reminders on my phone I don't really care what it's called. Still - renaming stuff can be annoying, they renamed google pay to wallet and I only found out when I went to pay for something and it wasn't there.

bitshiftfaced 3y ago
A couple of years ago, I tried migrating all of my reminders to Tasks. I can't remember why exactly, but for some reason I immediately had to go back to calendar reminders. There was some functionality that worked differently, but I can't remember what exactly. It might've been something about how calendar reminders persist in the taskbar until you click them away, and I need that in particular.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago

Any good sugestions of calendar alternatives in the Android space?

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
Second
arkitaip 3y ago
Fastmail has a pretty good calendar when you get subscribe for email. My main complaint is who don't use embedded calendar links and instead send you .ics files or force you to use Google Calendar.
- naavis 3y ago
  It's otherwise good, but the Fastmail calendar sadly doesn't have an Android widget, nor can you create reminders like in Google Calendar. You can only create events. I migrated emails to Fastmail a few years ago, but have been holding on to Google Calendar.
  - natejlong 3y ago
    This setup works well for making any calendar host (fastmail, nextcloud, anything with caldav) work identically to native Google Calendar: > Android does not support CalDAV natively, however you can easily add support by installing a CalDAV sync adapter. We have tested and recommend DAVx⁵, which is approximately $5. Once you have added your account in DAVx⁵, you can use the native Android calendar or any other calendar app and the changes will sync with Fastmail. https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279881-Set-up-Fastmail-on-Android#calendar https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279881-Se... It also covers contacts integration too!
- mkl 3y ago
  I'm just experimenting with this. Is there a way to make the week view scroll a week at a time instead of a day? Is there a way to duplicate an event?

javajosh 3y ago

I have a suggestion for Google: make an interactive graphical mind map representation of your products and shows relationships between them. Have that be the response to google.com/products. Add layers, like for a map, that show old and new names, and proposed names. Make an attempt to identity the product-neutral set of "degrees of freedom" that each product gives the user. This would be a fun, stand-alone project for an intern. Maybe use D3 or processing.js for the front-end. Such an artifact would be useful to users and Google leadership alike.

Eumenes 3y ago
They must no doubt have this internally
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  Wasn't it like 10 years ago that they had a 3B line monorepo for the entire org? Does g3 still have a stranglehold on the org?
  - Arbortheus 3y ago
    Google still famously uses a monorepo. With lots of heavy set-built tooling, their own variant of Bazel for builds, it works well. I imagine a lot of engineering effort goes into making it work.
- cloudking 3y ago
  Yes, it hasn't been released because they are still trying to figure it out
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rolisz 3y ago
For an intern? You mean it would be a PhD thesis in and of itself. Google has had more than 18 chat apps, some of which had the same name... At the same time, but couldn't talk to each other .

godzillabrennus 3y ago

Maybe they could pull their heads out of their rears and put Google Duplex on iPhone? Seems like a 7 year old tech still beats Siri and could have a halo effect for android but most Americans have iPhones and can’t use it.

jeffparsons 3y ago

On my Google phone, if I try to edit a reminder through the GUI, it refuses to show me a screen to edit the reminder. Instead, it spends several seconds loading the voice assistant, which then eventually asks aloud what I would like to change. It's been like that ever since they started pushing the assistant stuff harder, whenever that was. If they've fixed that, then I'll be happy. I never did like my phone suddenly yelling at me in otherwise quiet places.

oblio 3y ago
Google Maps has an auto mode on Android. Well, if you set a destination and start the trip, it shows a big X button at the bottom, to stop the trip. Guess what loads slowly and goes in the location of the big X button? You guessed right, the Google voice assistant, which I don't use. They're really pushing the voice assistant.
- Already__Taken 3y ago
  the voice assistant keeps thinking my podcast is talking to it
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  The problem is the voice assistant doesn't work the way you want it to work which is like star trek. But the reason the computer works in star trek is because it's either a) a hyper intelligent ai that automates the ship so people can go about more interesting activities such as exploring the Galaxy or b) it's a storytelling tool that enters the script whenever a boring thing for the characters to do comes up so they can get back to pushing the story along. Neither of those are really accessible to us today. But that doesn't stop people from wishing they were.
  - csydas 3y ago
    I'm not sure we're actually that far off technically from getting the _kind_ of automation that Star Trek computer can do, we're just trying to get our voice assistants to do a ton of other crap that the Star Trek computer doesn't have to worry about on the business level. Star Trek computer has no idea about advertisements/search optimization, etc, it's more like a helpful shell/magic talking box in most cases. If the Star Trek doesn't understand the request or can't complete it as requested, it prompts the user for more details or parameters and lets you know what you didn't give it. Similarly, the way we see interactions with the computer in TNG is that you define a task for the computer and the computer further defines business rules until it can start a workflow. It's not trying to push you towards a specific source of information or a specific outcome, it's just trying to define the rules to take your input and get the desired output. AI-based control systems like this need to be established like we'd have a library or framework or protocol first, something that is just built for accomplishing tasks and refining that to a point that it is a workhorse. When it comes to subjective matters, it needs to not try to build a profile on what you want and predict it, it needs to be painfully obtuse in its objectivity. Even on Star Trek, the computer struggled with matters of personal taste/entertainment even though it could ingest complex technical requirements and write equally or more complex workflows/code on the fly for specific tasks. It was pretty often with things like the holodeck or even just playing music/games to pass the time the computer didn't understand what the requestor meant and even though it produced an output, the output had to be refined a lot in fairly specific terms. Even something like shopping was still pretty manual, just piecing through a catalog of items to replicate was seen many times. The point is that the Star Trek computer was optimized for specific workloads and shined there, and stayed out of the way for absolutely everything else. I'm don't have hope that modern tech companies have the discipline to design something like this. AI and smart homes I think lack a lot of focus and polish, trying to be way too much at once and also return further revenue for the businesses with ad-tech; I don't have any hope that modern tech companies are going to be the smart-home revolution as much as FOSS will, but that of course has the chicken and egg problem of finding hardware that will actually work with FOSS smart-homes; I'll gladly side with Stallman on this one and position that if the entire stack was truly free, then we would see innovation and closer to Star Trek style smart homes since you could buy any smart-object and just run free software on it that meets your needs. But I don't have hope that any tech company has a desire or interest in this, and personally I cannot get invested in anything from the major tech companies as it's just going to be obsolete in a few years and the services will stop working; Google has demonstrated this with far too many projects, and even Apple struggles to get its smart-object integrations to stick (I think one of the major car manufacturers dropped CarPlay for their new vehicles going forward?) It's hard for me to be excited or interested in smart-anything as I don't have the confidence I can rely on it for more than a year or two.

xnx 3y ago

This is a good thing. Google is rightly criticized for having overlapping/duplicate functionally in their services. This is an example of them slowly/responsibly combining some.

oefrha 3y ago
This is good only if the replacement/combined product isn't inferior and important features don't get lost in the process. I've been burned multiple times already.
hgsgm 3y ago
By adding a whole separate app to juggle?
fbdab103 3y ago
Part of consolidation would be ensuring migration from the old to the new. Something which Google is not attempting to do here.

anothernewdude 3y ago

The worst UI is one that changes unexpectedly.

edandersen 3y ago

"Reminders created in Keep will not be migrated to Tasks — they will still be available in Keep, but they will no longer be displayed in Google Calendar once the migration is complete." So they didn't finish the User Story?

ajmurmann 3y ago
Instead of cancelling products and getting bad reputation for it, is Google now quiet quitting their products?
nkrisc 3y ago
As a user, I want my reminders on Google Keep to be migrated to Google tasks so that I can experience the benefits of reduced maintenance, development, and improved product experience from a more cohesive and consolidated product strategy.
- cobertos 3y ago
  As a user, I would like to get off this wild ride and have my products work as intended.
indymike 3y ago
This is a huge failure. Google Keep was really, really good.
SloopJon 3y ago
Damn it! I forget why I started using Keep reminders in the first place, but that's where I put all my bill reminders, including annual and semi-annual premiums. It is beyond a cliche at this point that Google unceremoniously dumps products and features (RIP Reader and Bookmarks), but when you're creating "a single experience for managing to-dos across Google," why, oh why, wouldn't you migrate reminders from Keep? Did they forget about it until too late?
- htrp 3y ago
  Different team in a different org.

RheingoldRiver 3y ago

Does anyone know why I would've stopped getting a daily google calendar reminder on February 21st? This is a bit before the rollover for personal accounts. It was to take pills that I need to take daily, and I think I missed several doses (not consecutively, I often remember without the email) before I realized that the email was gone, which is pretty frightening.

andyjih_ 3y ago
I’m still getting mine. Might be worth checking spam?
- RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  Definitely not going to spam, but thanks for the suggestion. Since you said you're getting them, I'll try recreating the reminder and see what happens.

mkl 3y ago

I'm interested in people's experiences switching from Google Calendar to Fastmail Calendar. Is Fastmail a good replacement? It sounds like basic calendar events will be unchanged by this (though I'm not completely clear on that), but Google Calendar is the only Google service I'm using regularly and I wouldn't mind getting off it.

nashashmi 3y ago

We're missing a task synchronization server. we already have a Calendar synchronization server.

nixpulvis 3y ago

I guess this shows how cynical I am, but this title really confused me. Here I was thinking Google was going to do away with their calendar. I mean, if it meant that they started working on interop features and standards again maybe I'd be excited...

deleted 3y ago

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binkHN 3y ago

I did this migration on my phone and it broke reminder creation on my Google smart speakers. Only works on my phone now.

suddenclarity 3y ago

I'm not really sure if reminders are different from events. I get an email the day before any repeating birthday I've added to my Google Calendar. Will this functionality be impacted of this change? The blog post does a poor job explaining how it works today and what will change.

hgsgm 3y ago
Reminders are the reminder part without an event. They don't have a fixed time/duration, they have a start time and duration, and they float until marked completed or deletes.

martyvis 3y ago

I installed the Tasks app on my Pixel. I saw my reminders were all in My Tasks. I easily created anew list. I cannot see how I can move a task from the default bucket My Tasks to my new list. Am I missing something?

indymike 3y ago

Honestly, this just creates opportunities for people to try out new products when they rage quit because some deeply buried feature in Google’s to-do feature makes their personal workflow crash.

crazygringo 3y ago

There seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion here in the comments. Calendar is not going away, calendar events are not being touched, this has nothing to do with alerts for calendar events, and this does not require you to use a new/separate app. Google has simply had different things called both "reminders" and "tasks" across apps, for legacy reasons. For a long time there's been a "reminder" object in Calendar (different from events), and then a "task" object got added as well (that shares data with the Tasks app). There's no good UX reason for these to be separate types of objects, so now "reminders" and "tasks" are being consolidated into just "tasks". But they're staying in Calendar. (And can also be edited in the Tasks app which has been around for years already.) This is good. It's simplifying. (As to why they're now splitting off reminders created in Google Keep rather than integrating them too, I don't know for sure. But I've never understood the use case of reminders in Keep at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if they deprecate that feature entirely. Keep reminders came before Tasks existed at all, but now you should just use Tasks.)

dragonwriter 3y ago
> This is good. It's simplifying Crippling Keep is neither good nor simplifying.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  What do you use reminders for in Keep? Keep is for keeping snippets of text, notes -- I've never understood why you'd put a reminder on that. If you were using Keep as a kind of reminders/tasks list, you should switch to Tasks for that, since it's much better designed for that use case.
  - NhanH 3y ago
    Because Keep was released FIVE years before Task. And at the same rate, we are gonna have the same conversation in 5 years on why someone haven’t started using the new SuperDuperKeepTask service. From the product POV, anyone who has ever used knowledge base will tell you that you should keep everything related to your data/ info in a single app. Spreading them out by any categorization is just inviting recall issue later on.

morkalork 3y ago

Why is it that every product starts to evolve "productivity" features? Is it just a lazy way to keep juice feature release KPIs? Even my freaking keyboard app* added it. Why? So I can make tasks while making tasks?! * https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-to-do-blog/add-tasks-to-your-to-do-list-right-in-the-swiftkey-keyboard/ba-p/3143221 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-to-do-blog/...

LightBug1 3y ago

Wow ... you mean Google is acknowledging that Tasks actuallys exists?! Such a basic productivity area has languished for a decade ...

m-p-3 3y ago

Fair enough, all these systems were implemented at different times for different reason, while achieving a similar goal. Unifying them behind a single system is a good thing. I'm happy to know that my tasks and reminders generated from Google Assistant will show up at one place, and one place only. No more guessing.

butz 3y ago

Imagine how surprised I was when I found out all of my old reminders from Google Keep quietly sitting in my Google Calendar. Nobody told me about any integration and for the longest I thought they were not synced. BTW, I'm still searching for a decent offline Android TODO app.

robk 3y ago

It still drives me insane on Ios that there's no way to share to Google Tasks. For years I've asked for this simple option as my main work flow is to share from the browser to tasks for things to revisit later.

TheCleric 3y ago

Yay, can't wait until they abandon or replace this in 2 years.

telotortium 3y ago

Since it's been almost a decade, I figure I can tell this story: I was on the Calendar team at that time, and some project managers enlisted me to do some data analysis to determine if Tasks should be shut down in favor of reminders. At this time, there was no mobile app for Tasks - the only official mobile site was the basic HTML version for pre-iPhone smartphones. There were, however, several third-party mobile apps using the Tasks API. I was able to demonstrate that those apps, plus the official desktop client (inside Gmail), were responsible for a lot of monthly active users. So I guess Google has finally deduplicated by shutting down Reminders instead, which I think was the right decision. It was probably around 5 years ago or so that Google released an official Tasks mobile app.

nytesky 3y ago

Will task get its own web page and maybe support easier management thru the web, sub task, etc?