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Introducing Preminder, a simple and free iOS app to add a reminder some interval before a date

Sometimes an app idea comes from a need to scratch one’s own itch. My latest app is such a case: Preminder is a simple and free iOS app to add a reminder to Apple Reminders some number of days, weeks, months, or years before another date.

But why is that useful? I’m glad you asked. A common situation my wife and I have as we travel around the country in our motorhome is that RV parks only allow reserving sites a certain time period ahead. We like to plan our route a year or more in advance, and try to book popular places as early as possible, before they fill up. So given the date we want to arrive, we need to add a reminder six months or 90 days (or whatever their booking window is) before that.

The app is useful for more than campgrounds, though. Some exciting gadget going on sale in 30 days? Add a reminder. Hard-to-get concert tickets becoming available? Need to buy birthday gifts? Add a reminder, easily.

Sure, you could calculate the number of days, or ask a digital assistant to calculate it for you, but it’s much more convenient to be able to just enter when the event is and the desired offset, and have the app do the calculation and add the reminder.

6 months before Date picker Remind before

Want to try it?

Get Preminder 1.0 now — it’s free!

Weather Events 1.1 released: automatic location update option, and other improvements

I’m pleased to announce the first update of Weather Events, my app to record weather conditions on your calendar, available for macOS, iOS, and visionOS!

The biggest change in version 1.1 is a new option in Settings to choose what location to use when adding new days. By default, it is Previous Day, which uses the same location as the last day in the weather list; this is the behavior from the first release. But you can now choose to use the location from a calendar event: from All-Day Events (i.e. without a time assigned), Timed Events (i.e. with a time assigned), or Any Events (all day or timed).

So if you have a calendar event with a location, the app can use that location automatically when adding a new day. Of course, if there is no matching calendar event, it inherits the location from the previous day. And if there are multiple matching events, it picks the one with the latest start date for all-day events, or the longest duration for timed events.

This new option is great for people who travel a lot, like me: my wife and I travel around the US in a motorhome, heading south in winter and north in summer to chase ideal weather conditions, so pretty much every week we’re in a new location. Which is one of the reasons for writing Weather Events, so I can keep a record of the weather as we travel. I have all-day events in my calendar for where we’ll be, so now Weather Events can see those and automatically update the location, and I no longer need to manually edit the days. Nice.

Settings windowSettings all day

But wait, there’s more! Version 1.1 includes a bunch of other nice improvements and fixes:

  • When there are multiple accounts with calendars, they are grouped by account in the initial setup and Settings.
  • If full calendar access has not been granted, now displays an Authorize Calendar Access button next to the menu at the top of the weather list.
  • When 24 hours of weather conditions aren’t available for a day, now determines the best summary of the weather that it can with the available hours.
  • Improved fetching weather for events that had a changed location.
  • Improved searching for new locations, to provide better results and be more reliable.
  • Fixed obscure crash on iOS when adding a new location by editing an event via a widget.
  • Fixed the accent color not being respected on the latest OS versions.
  • Now uses ° instead of F or C after the temperature in the status item on Mac.
  • The Today’s Weather widget now uses a bold rounded font:

Widgets

Want to try it?

If you already have the app, you can update via the App Store.

Otherwise, get Weather Events 1.1 now!