My macOS ai coding projects to date

This is a reference post - mostly for my own use. Over the past few months I've used ai coding tools to create several personal solutions. I don't think the results are appropriate to share on github - it's probably easier/faster to have an ai recreate from general descriptions. In future I'll give projects a separate post in case anyone wants to the code, and if I remember I'll add them to this list and link to a project specific post.

• PDF highlight exporter: I did this for my Old Person UMN courses. All our readings are PDF now. In Apple Preview I highlight text of interest, then drop PDF on a Python applet that creates a citation-friendly plaintext file I can use in studying, writing, and import into MindNode.
• Windows slideshow from macOS Photos. Creates an 800x600 floating window and displays specified album photos in a slideshow window that behaves like any other Finder window.
• Web scraper of all articles by a specific journalist - a single use script that created a citation-friendly plaintext of all articles by them.
• Folder search in Photos.app. It's banana-pants that Photos does not search folder names. I have hundreds of folders. The script creates a plaintext file I can search using a text editor. It's easy to then browse to the folder in macOS Photos
• A web app that reformats an unreadable public Google Sheet into a mobile/desktop friendly view of CrossFit Minneapolis-St Paul workouts. This is one of my faves; I use it several times a week and it's the only app so far that other people use.
• A data reformatting app that takes several standard CSV files from SportsEngine and turns them into a useful worksheet.
• A data reformatting app that lets me download a class list and turn it into names I can put into Apple Notes.

For context I have extensive (decades) of work experience as a product manager and in technical domains too esoteric to describe. I last coded for money around 1981 (FORTRAN), did a shareware C app in the 90s that had one paying customer, and I can more or less read/edit Python. I would never have done these projects without ai coding but I do have serious development experience.

Migrating from Microsoft To Do to Apple Reminders

I've used Microsoft's To Do app for several years but Microsoft has failed to fix a number of annoying bugs. Meanwhile Apple Reminders has pretty much crushed all macOS alternatives; it's now effectively the only game in town. Especially since I no longer need Apple/Windows interop. So it's migration time again, now from To Do to Apple Reminders. I'll share here a few things I've learned during this migration.

My tasks have gone through at least five migrations over 3-4 decades. I think I last migrated from Toodledo.  I've lost track of all the various apps I've used before that. The digital task list might have started with the PalmPilot in the 90s but it's more likely that they began in one of the many cool but forgotten "Personal Information Managers" that we used in the 80s and 90s.

Some past migrations, especially in the PalmOS days, used CSV export/import. That failed as data structures became more complex. Now I tend to migrate over time, reentering some tasks, closing out others. I could probably boil the ocean and have an agent do it, or ask an ai to write code to do it, but I've grown to accept the migration refactoring as valuable. Part of the migration is archiving all data.

Which is all context for quickly sharing a few things I have learned. I'll update this post with other things I learn.

• Neither Microsoft To Do or Apple Reminders have export/import or good backup support. They are cloud first with the usual cloud issues.  To Do data can supposedly be exported via Outlook. There are decent sounding Shortcut based options for JSON export from Reminders. I have not used them yet.
• Apple Reminders has subtasks. They are cleverly hidden from basic use.
• Reminder "Sections" are most useful as Kanban-style column headers. I think that's what the feature was designed for. Switch to Column view to see them. They are also cleverly hidden from basic use.
• You can't hide Notes from displaying in Reminder views and messing up the display list. A workaround for longer notes is to attach them to a subtask and hide the subtask. There's also a way to create a link to Notes.app Note -- but it's supremely weird in Sequoia so I put hints below.
• I have been warned that Reminders has iCloud sync bugs. I suspect those are more common with the advanced features I'm using.  Recurring reminders are created even when a prior instance is not completed. 
• Reminder settings are not all synchronized across devices. In particular the default List for a new Reminder is device specific.

Hints on creating a link from a Reminder to Notes.app Note

Over the past decade macOS users have grown accustomed to half-assed Apple products with eccentric UI and weird behaviors. Even by that standard the Notes link behavior is damned weird. There doesn't seem to be any documentation.

You create the link from the Share menu. You can either get a URL to manually add to an existing Reminder or you can create a new Reminder with the URL attached (and then move it, etc). Either way, from the Share Sheet, you must change the almost invisible access control from person-based collaboration to 'Anyone with link'. Once you've done that you can use the Share to Reminders to create a reminder. To get the link you click "Invite" (heaven knows why) -- nothing seems to happen, but now he Share Sheet will display a Copy Link menu item. You can click that and paste into the Reminder URL field. The resulting link is to iCloud but I think macOS intercepts and redirects to the Notes app.

There's nothing about the Note to tell you that it's referenced by a Reminder link. So for the notes that I use this way I tag them as "reminder_note" and I have a smart group that includes that tag.