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.)
Playing devil’s advocate: calendar events happen at a place and time, and they have a finite, nonzero duration.
Tasks are things that one should do.
A reminder reminds the user of something at a specific time or perhaps at a heuristically chosen convenient time in a range.
So a satellite flying directly overhead or someone’s birthday or simply wanting to be reminded of a fact on a day is not a task. There’s nothing to do, and checking it off makes no sense. (Although wishing someone happy birthday could be a task.). Simply showing the user the reminder accomplishes the goal. On the other hand, most calendar programs struggle with events with no duration, and overlaying reminders onto a schedule makes the schedule harder to read.
What you're calling reminders are just calendar events.
A birthday is a repeating calendar event. You're free to create a calendar event with 0:00 duration in Google Calendar, it works fine. You can also create all-day events that show up at the top and don't make the schedule harder to read.
This describes more or less how I use calendar reminders. Typically, if I see a trailer for a film that looks good, I make a reminder several months ahead to check it out. I don't think of these as 'tasks to be completed', but more like 'notes to my future self'.
> 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.
Keep reminders intuitively made sense to me. They're sticky notes that you can label/index/search. Reminders allow you to be reminded of a specific note, which I find tremendously useful. Also location based reminders are great, e.g. grocery list that pops up when you're at the store.
"Tasks" suffered from the obvious- they were integrated in Gmail through labs and then calendar widget, but then keep reminders and assistant reminders appeared on the calendar. It was confusing. Keep makes it relatively simple, though you're right, it can be deprecated soon. Still not sure I'm ready to use "Tasks" yet.
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.
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 .
Some companies are so profitable, they can hide layers and layers of managerial ineptitude. Think how great Google could be if they had cohesion and oversight.
Also, many of which were essentially the same, despite the different names. Theoretically a message made in Google Talk in 2005 would have been visible in chat history through migrations/rebrandings to Hangouts and Chat. You'd need a fair bit of research and a flowchart to explain them all.
Where more than one product has the same name then both should be renamed. From that point onwards, they should never re-use an old name. Things would be so much less confusing.
I remember Buzz and Reader both doing very well at this, oddly. Then they killed it for plus, of course. Still the dumbest thing they have done, to my mind.
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.
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.
By doing so, they are putting lots of things at risk. Up until the last year Android Auto has been so good that I think most people would rather use it than the in-built system in their car. The last UI update made it kind of frustrating. So frustrating that car companies will get the misguided notion they can do it better.
The same thing was happening to me for a really long time. I migrated to Tasks and it's been working fine since then (mainly because it's a different app). There are some minor quirks with the new app, nothing that bothers me, it's just different. But overall I'd say it's an improvement.
Hopefully the rollout a d migration works out well.
I just never enable the voice assistant from the start and I don't have problems like this. I don't know if it's possible to disable after the fact. All I want voice for is occasional text input and that works fine.
"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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.)
Tasks are things that one should do.
A reminder reminds the user of something at a specific time or perhaps at a heuristically chosen convenient time in a range.
So a satellite flying directly overhead or someone’s birthday or simply wanting to be reminded of a fact on a day is not a task. There’s nothing to do, and checking it off makes no sense. (Although wishing someone happy birthday could be a task.). Simply showing the user the reminder accomplishes the goal. On the other hand, most calendar programs struggle with events with no duration, and overlaying reminders onto a schedule makes the schedule harder to read.
A birthday is a repeating calendar event. You're free to create a calendar event with 0:00 duration in Google Calendar, it works fine. You can also create all-day events that show up at the top and don't make the schedule harder to read.
Crippling Keep is neither good nor simplifying.
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.
Keep reminders intuitively made sense to me. They're sticky notes that you can label/index/search. Reminders allow you to be reminded of a specific note, which I find tremendously useful. Also location based reminders are great, e.g. grocery list that pops up when you're at the store.
"Tasks" suffered from the obvious- they were integrated in Gmail through labs and then calendar widget, but then keep reminders and assistant reminders appeared on the calendar. It was confusing. Keep makes it relatively simple, though you're right, it can be deprecated soon. Still not sure I'm ready to use "Tasks" yet.
Such an artifact would be useful to users and Google leadership alike.
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If they've fixed that, then I'll be happy. I never did like my phone suddenly yelling at me in otherwise quiet places.
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.
By doing so, they are putting lots of things at risk. Up until the last year Android Auto has been so good that I think most people would rather use it than the in-built system in their car. The last UI update made it kind of frustrating. So frustrating that car companies will get the misguided notion they can do it better.
The same thing was happening to me for a really long time. I migrated to Tasks and it's been working fine since then (mainly because it's a different app). There are some minor quirks with the new app, nothing that bothers me, it's just different. But overall I'd say it's an improvement.
Hopefully the rollout a d migration works out well.
So they didn't finish the User Story?
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?
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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.
My calendar events are not tasks. The reminders for them are not tasks either. So this is worrying for me.