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Reminders, alerts and alarms

Three words that mean three different things in Calendite.

  • An Event Alert is a thing attached to an event that fires at a time. It is either an Alarm or a Notification.
  • An Alarm rings and takes over the screen, even locked, like a phone alarm clock.
  • A Notification is a normal Android notification. No takeover.
  • A Reminder is not an alert at all. It's one of the four calendar items: the one you have to do rather than attend.

Alerts on an event

Add them from the event form's Alerts tile. An alert fires either at an exact date and time, or relative to the event's occurrence: "10 minutes before it starts", "5 minutes after it ends".

Choose Alarm or Notification per alert. An event can carry several.

Alert templates

An alert's title and body can pull values out of the event using % codes:

%t starts in %tm minutes

→ "Stand-up starts in 10 minutes"

There are 27 codes. The ones you'll use most:

Code Gives
%t the event title
%T the alert's own title
%tm %th %td minutes / hours / days until (or since)
%tf %tc time until, full (2 hours 15 minutes) or compact (2h 15m)
%dm %dh %df %dc the event's duration, same four ways
%Et %ET start time, 24-hour or AM/PM
%Ee end time
%Ed %ED %Ew date (locale), short date, day of week
%l %L location, full or short
%g %G tag name, tag colour
%n %N the current time / date
%% a literal %

The full list with descriptions is in the alert template syntax reference.

The same codes work whether the alert fires before, during or after the event: %tm says "in 10 minutes" beforehand and "10 minutes ago" after. On a ringing alarm the time-relative codes re-render about once a minute, so the count stays accurate while it rings.

If a code has nothing to resolve to (%l on an event with no location), it renders as nothing rather than an error.

Actions: open an app, or call someone

An alarm can carry one action, something it does when it rings besides ringing. Tap the Actions row on the alert and pick Open App or Phone Call. The ringing screen shows the action as a badge in the bell's place, TAP TO OPEN or TAP TO CALL curved around it, and the same button sits on the alarm's card in the notification shade. A call opens your phone app with the number ready; Calendite never dials by itself. See actions on alarms.

Reminders

Pick Reminder on the Choose a Calendar Item step that opens when you tap NEW.

A reminder differs from an event in three ways that matter:

  • No duration. It's a point in time, not a span. It's never all-day.
  • The alert is mandatory. A reminder that never fires is pointless, so you can't save one without an alert.
  • It can be completed. Events happen to you; reminders get ticked off.

Recurrence anchor

A repeating reminder computes its next occurrence one of two ways:

Anchor Behaviour
On schedule (default) dates come straight from the rule. Completing late, or deferring, never moves future occurrences.
After completion the next one is counted from your completion time plus the interval.

"Water the plants every 3 days" almost certainly wants after completion: three days after you last watered them, not every third calendar day.

"Submit timesheet every Friday" wants on schedule: Friday is Friday whether or not you did last week's late.

Do not interrupt

A per-reminder switch. When on, a reminder that would fire while you're in the middle of an event defers itself until that event ends rather than ringing over your meeting.

All-day events don't count as "in progress" for this; otherwise a single all-day event would silence a whole day. It gives up after three automatic deferrals so a reminder can't be postponed forever.

When one rings

Done or Remind Me Later. "Later" opens a picker so you choose a time, not a fixed snooze interval.

Completed reminders stay visible on the calendar, struck through and faded, so you can see what you've done rather than having it vanish.

Alarms in practice

An alarm shows a full-screen ringing screen over the lock screen, with slide-to-dismiss rather than a button, so it is hard to silence by accident in your pocket.

Three Android permissions matter:

  • Notifications: without it, nothing appears at all.
  • Exact alarms: without it Calendite sets no alerts at all, rather than have Android fire them late to save battery. Android treats it as a special access, so it's asked for separately: in the setup wizard, or with Allow when you open an event's alerts. Grant it later and the alerts you've already set are armed straight away.
  • Showing alarms over other apps: optional. Without it the ringing screen is refused while you're actually using the phone, and the alarm can only reach the notification shade. It still rings, and can still be stopped from there.

Alarms survive a reboot: they're re-armed on boot.

The app-wide countdown

One alert isn't attached to anything: More → Notifications → Default alerts.

Countdown before every event is a live countdown that ticks down to the start. Switched on, it applies to every timed event without being added to any of them, so it never appears in an event's own alerts and doesn't have to be maintained there. How long before sets the lead: 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes.

It is the one place a setting reaches into events you never edited, which is why it is stated here rather than left in Settings to be discovered.

Where alerts don't reach

  • Inner events do not inherit their parent's alerts. The inner event's detail screen shows the parent's alerts for context, but nothing is scheduled from them. Give an inner event its own alerts if it needs them.
  • Alerts are not shared. When you share a calendar, alerts and notes are deliberately excluded. Your partner sees the event, not your reminders about it.
  • Variants do inherit alerts from their base, live, and can suppress or add to them.

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