Support

Help, and the boundaries worth knowing first

Sift is a triage layer on top of Apple Reminders. It adds an urgent against important lens on iPhone and on the Mac. The card by card triage deck, the daily review and the evening focus pick run on both. Only the menu bar quick view, quick entry with ⌥Space, the Services item and the Safari Share extension are Mac only. Your tasks stay in Reminders the whole time.

Getting in touch

One address: bartadav@gmail.com. It is read by the person who writes the app.

What to put in a bug report

• The platform: Mac or iPhone.
• The app version and the build number.
• What you did, what happened, and what you expected instead.

On the Mac, Help then “Send Feedback” opens a mail message with the version, the build and your macOS version already filled in, so there is nothing to look up. On iPhone, Settings shows a Version row carrying both numbers.

Three things EventKit cannot do

Sift can only see what EventKit, Apple’s own framework for Reminders, exposes to it. Most of the surprising behaviour below is that boundary rather than a bug, and Sift is written to stop at it rather than to work around it.

• Tags, subtasks, flags and attachments are invisible. EventKit does not expose them, so Sift neither displays them nor rewrites them. They stay on your reminders untouched, and they stay untouched precisely because Sift cannot read them. This also means Sift never writes markers of its own into your notes: the notes field is yours.
• iCloud takes its time, and it cannot be hurried. A change you make in Sift is written to Reminders straight away, on the device you are holding. Getting from there to your other devices is iCloud’s job, it takes seconds to minutes, and no app can force it. If the Mac and the phone disagree for a moment, that is usually what you are looking at.
• Some repeat rules can be shown but not edited. Sift’s repeat editor covers frequency, an interval, weekly day toggles and an end condition. A rule that says something outside that vocabulary, “the last Thursday of the month” for example, is shown as a sentence you can read, with “Stop repeating” as the only change offered. That is deliberate: the alternative is to reopen the rule in a smaller vocabulary and silently flatten it into something you did not ask for.

If you delete Sift

Reminders keeps every task exactly as Sift last left it: the task, its priority and its list are where they always were, because they were always in Reminders, and nothing about the uninstall rewrites a thing. Native repeats stay native. What disappears is Sift’s own lens: the quadrants, the triage state and the review history. That is the whole deal, and it is the reason the app is safe to try.

One exception, and the app says it too. A repeat schedule is the one thing you can hand to Sift on purpose: converting it moves the rule into Sift’s layer and Reminders is left holding a single task whose date moves, which is exactly what the edit screen captions it as. Those tasks stop repeating when Sift goes, so convert a repeat because you want Sift to own it, not by accident.