Due dates, reminders and repeats

On an iPhone Duo opened out and held sideways, the screen is two pages. Your list is on the left, and the todo you tap opens on the right-hand page instead, while it stays in the list, highlighted. While it is open the sea behind dims, and so do the other todos in the list, so the one you opened stands out on both pages. The page has room to lay the todo out: its date and repeat side by side, its reminder and its tags below them, each written out in full, and its note right on the card, under its own Note heading with the formatting buttons above it, filling the rest of the page; a long note scrolls inside it. Tap the date, the repeat, the reminder or the tags to change them; they open at the width of the card, with the card still showing above them. Tap another todo to switch to it, or tap the sky or the water to put it down. Fold the phone or turn it upright and the open todo stays open, where it sits in the list.

Everything you type is saved as you type it. There is no save button and no cancel; closing it just closes it.

Choosing Today, Tomorrow or Next week for a due date or reminder, or a choice under Repeat, sets it and closes the panel in one tap. Pick a date and time stays open while you choose the day and the time, and the note and tags stay open while you work in them; tap Done when you have finished.

Due dates

A due date is a day, with a time if you want one. As the day approaches the date changes colour (green when it is due today, red once it is overdue), and the todo shows up in Today from its due day onward.

A due date never moves the todo. It changes the colour of the date and whether the todo appears in Today, and nothing else. Where it sits in the list is still only ever something you decided. An anchored todo is the one case where the date decides where it waits: it rests at the bottom of Everything until its date, then comes back like any dated todo. See Float, surface, sink, anchor.

Today, Tomorrow and Next week give a bare day. Pick a date and time always gives the day a time too, starting at a default time of day you can set in Settings → Dates & Times, along with which day your week starts on and what Next week means.

Reminders

A reminder is an alarm. It arrives as a normal notification, marked time-sensitive so a Focus should let it through, and tapping it opens the screen for a reminder that has gone off.

Two things worth knowing:

• Float can only ask permission once. If you say no to the system prompt, it cannot ask again. You turn notifications back on in System Settings on a Mac, or Settings on iPhone. Float tells you when they are off rather than setting an alarm that cannot ring.
• A reminder goes quiet once it has gone off. The bell disappears and the field stops showing a time, because an alarm that has already rung should not still look like it is set. Float still remembers when it was: defer the todo and the alarm comes along to the new day.

Settings → Notifications has a switch for reminders, another for Low Tide, and one for Today's count on the app icon (the Dock icon on a Mac), on top of whatever the system permission allows.

Notes

A note is for whatever will not fit in a title: what you actually have to do, who said so, the address. It holds a great deal of text, so pasting a whole email into one is a reasonable thing to do.

Notes take a little formatting, using the row of buttons above the writing area. Select some words and press one, or press it first and type.

Formatting shows up as you write it. Press Bold and the next thing you type is bold; select some words and press it and they turn bold in front of you. The same formatting shows wherever Float shows you the whole note: on a card in Done or the Trash, on a Low Tide card, and on the screen a reminder opens. On the list itself a note is still a single quiet mark, never a preview.

Two things behave a little differently from the rest:

• Lists keep their marker visible. A bulleted line shows its bullet and a numbered line shows its number, so you can see and edit them like any other text. Everything else hides the marks once it is formatted.
• Typing the marks yourself no longer formats anything. Two asterisks around a word stay two asterisks. Use the buttons instead. Lists and web addresses are the exception: type - at the start of a line, or type an address anywhere, and Float still does the right thing.

Web and email addresses link themselves. Type or paste apple.com, www.apple.com or a full https:// address and Float makes it a link wherever it shows you the note. You do not need the link button for that. Float leaves your words exactly as you typed them, and it is deliberately careful: a sentence with a missing space after a full stop stays a sentence.

The link button asks you for two things, because a link is words plus an address. Select some words first and they arrive already filled in; then paste the address and press Save. You can leave off the https:// and Float will add it, and typing an email address gives you a mail link.

Press Return in a list and you get the next item. Numbers count up on their own. Press Return again on an empty item and the list ends, so you never have to delete a marker Float just wrote for you.

Four things worth knowing:

• Links open in your browser, and only ordinary web and email addresses do. Anything else stays as plain words, and the link dialog will not let you save one.
• In the writing area they link the next time you open the note. Float does not re-read your words while you are typing, so an address you have just typed stays plain there until you close the note and open it again.
• Nothing you type can break. Marks Float does not recognise are left exactly as you typed them, so a note about 2 * 3 stays a note about 2 * 3.
• On a Mac a note can open in its own window. Tap a todo you have already added, open its note, and the button at the right-hand end of the button row pops it out, which is worth doing for anything longer than a couple of lines. It saves as you type, exactly as it does everywhere else, so closing the window is all there is to do when you are finished. You can have several open at once. The button is not there while you are still adding the todo, because there would be nothing to attach the window to yet. On iPhone the note already has a sheet of its own, the whole screen on most iPhones, so there is no such button.

Notifications and printed lists get the words without the marks: a reminder shows plain text, and a printout prints the formatting properly, with a link's address next to it since paper cannot be clicked.

Repeats

Six rules: never, daily, weekly, monthly, every 6 months and yearly. A monthly repeat can be a day of the month or a weekday within it: the third, or the second Tuesday.

Every 6 months is for the things that come round twice a year, like swapping your tyres. It comes back on the same day of the month half a year later, and its row names both days, such as Apr 15 and Oct 15, so you can see the pair before you pick it.

Only the next one is ever on your list. Float does not fill it with a year of Tuesdays. Finish the one that is there and the next appears; the one you finished goes to Done like anything else.

Finish one late and the next one is still the next one. Float never skips a date in a repeat on its own. Finish a weekly todo that was due September 24 on October 1, and the next one is due October 1, that same day, not October 8. A daily todo you get to after three weeks away comes back for the day after the one you finished, already late, and each one you finish brings the next, so you catch up one at a time with only one on your list. If you would rather start again from today, change its date: the repeat carries on from the new one.

A monthly repeat on the 29th, 30th or 31st is due on the last day of a month too short for it, then goes back to its own day: a repeat on the 31st is due February 28, then March 31. Every 6 months does the same, which is why August 31 pairs with February 28. A yearly repeat on February 29 is due on February 28 in the years between. Open Repeat on the February one and it still says on the 31st, because that is the day it comes back to.

A reminder comes back with it. If the todo you finished had an alarm set, the next one gets the same alarm: the same number of days from its own date, at the same time of day. That holds whether you finish the todo before the alarm has gone off or long after it has. When the next one comes back already late, its alarm time has gone by too, so it shows no bell and does not ring; it keeps the alarm all the same, and the first one still ahead of you rings as usual.

Moving a repeating todo to the Trash from the list asks you one question, because there are two sensible answers: Move This One to Trash, which lets it carry on repeating, or Move the Series to Trash, which stops it for good. A repeating todo always has a date, so it never comes up in Low Tide, which only asks about todos without one.

Deferring

Defer is for a todo that is due today or overdue, when you are not going to do it today. Press and hold it (right-click on a Mac) and push it back without opening its date: Defer until tomorrow, or Defer until the start of next week, named by its date, as you have set it in “Next week” means in Settings → Dates & Times. Its due date moves to that day, the todo stays where it is in the list, and Float offers you an Undo. When tomorrow is the start of next week, you see the day once.

Anything in Today can be deferred, and nothing else. A todo due later is not offered Defer at all: it is not due yet, so there is nothing to put off. To give it a different day, change its date. A dated todo moves its date; a floated one moves its float.

On a floated todo, what moves is the float. Deferring one takes it out of Today and brings it back, floated, on the day you chose. It does not get a due date; Float will not turn "not today" into a deadline you never set, and nothing about a deferred float ever goes red. See Float, surface, sink, anchor for the mark it wears in the meantime.

A todo that is floated and due today has two reasons to be in Today, so one Defer moves both: it comes back on the new day exactly as it left, floated and due. A floated todo whose date is still to come keeps that date; only the float moves.

Its alarm comes along, keeping its place beside the todo's date and its time of day, even when it has already gone off: push a todo due today to tomorrow, and the alarm that rang this morning rings again tomorrow morning.

Deferring a repeating todo moves this one, not the repeat. Push a Thursday chore to Saturday and the next one is still due on a Thursday, which is also what its Repeat panel says: on Thursday. A defer never skips one either: push a daily todo until tomorrow and do it then, and tomorrow's own one comes next, due that same day. Push a weekly one past its next Thursday and that Thursday still comes back once you finish it. To move the whole repeat to a new day, change the todo's date instead.

Two things Defer will not do. It will not push a todo that is not in Today, whether it is due later, anchored until its day, or has no date at all; the rows are simply not offered, and changing the date is how you move a day that has not come yet. And it does not move a reminder on its own: an alarm is pushed by snoozing it, which is the other verb, in minutes and hours rather than whole days.