Getting started

Calendite is a calendar with a rule engine at its core. Instead of the rigid "repeats every week" options most calendars give you, you describe when something happens and Calendite turns it into a precise rule, worked out on your device.

This page covers what happens the first time you open the app, and how to find your way around.

First run: the setup wizard

Six steps, in this order. You can change every one of them later.

1. Import from your calendar: reads the device's own calendar so you don't start from an empty grid. Needs the calendar permission, and it keeps reading it afterwards (see device calendar sync).
2. Permissions: notifications, exact alarms, and showing alarms over other apps. The first two matter most: without exact alarms Android is free to fire your alarms late, and Calendite has to ask for that one separately because Android treats it as a special access. The third is optional: an alarm without it still rings and can still be stopped from the notification shade, but the ringing screen can't take over while you're using the phone.
3. Country: sets which days count as the weekend, how dates are ordered, and which bank-holiday calendar applies. UK default is Monday-first weeks and the England & Wales holiday list.
4. Tags: pick a starter set. Tags carry colour and can pre-fill new events.
5. Work: describes your working pattern, so WD and rules built on Tag(Work) are meaningful from day one.
6. Backup: how the encrypted database is protected if the phone is lost. See backup and restore. Android only.

A phone already carrying a backup that nobody has restored opens on a Welcome Back step before all of those, because a restore replaces most of what they collect.

Getting around

On a phone there are four things along the bottom:

On a tablet or desktop window the bottom bar is replaced by a sidebar down the left, and a day agenda rail appears on the right showing the selected day. The layout switches on window width, not device type, so a split-screen phone behaves like a phone and a resized desktop window adapts as you drag it.

What's under MORE

Creating your first event

Tap NEW. The form asks for a title and when it happens; everything else is optional and lives behind the OPTIONS grid below the fold: location, alerts, notes, colour, visibility, an app to launch, and so on.

The When section is where Calendite differs from other calendars. Three modes:

• No Repeat: a single date.
• Repeating Rules: the picker-driven builder. Choose patterns and exceptions; the compiled rule shows in the RULE bar so you can see what you built.
• Manual Input: type the schedule in plain English, or write the rule directly.

Whatever you pick, tap the calendar preview to see the actual dates it produces before you commit. That preview is the fastest way to learn the rule language: build something with the pickers, then read what it compiled to.

Which kind of thing?

Tapping NEW asks Choose a Calendar Item before it shows you a form, because not everything on a calendar is an event. There are four:

• an Event, something you attend, with a start and an end time;
• a Reminder, something you have to do rather than somewhere you have to be: no duration, a mandatory alert, and it gets ticked off;
• a Deadline, a moment something is due by, counting down to it and then up past it;
• a Time period, a span of whole days such as a holiday or time off work.

What you pick decides which fields the form then shows. See Calendar items for what each does differently.

A good first hour

To see what the app is designed for, in order:

1. Set up your Work pattern properly in the wizard; most of the interesting features build on it.
2. Add a bank holidays data source (More → Data sources; gov.uk publishes JSON), then change your Work rule to WD, !BankHolidays and watch the holidays drop out.
3. Add an inner event to Work (for example a stand-up) and see it appear only on work days.
4. If you work shifts, add a variant and see one series carry several sets of hours, or, if your rota has no normal week to vary from, make an event group and paint it.

That sequence covers the three ideas the rest of the app rests on.

Where things are stored

• Events, tags, alerts and settings: a local database on the device.
• Notes and descriptions: plain .md files, either in app-private storage or a folder you choose (More → Notes & files).
• Backups: if you chose one, a sealed bundle that only your phone's backup system carries. Nothing else in the app's storage is eligible for it. See backup and restore.
• Nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you turn on calendar sharing and choose a relay server, or you turn a backup on. There is no account and no default cloud.

Keeping the app up to date

The preview build is downloaded from this site rather than from Google Play, so nothing updates it for you. The app checks for itself: More → Update App reads the same manifest the download page does, tells you which version you are on and which is out, and shows that version's release notes under WHAT'S NEW.

If there is a newer one, Download & install fetches the APK and hands it to Android's installer. Android will ask you to allow installing apps from Calendite the first time, which is the same prompt you saw when you first installed it. The download runs in the background with its own notification, so it survives leaving the app.

Release notes are not on this site; that screen is where you read them.

Next

• Calendar views: Month, Week and Day, and what the week view is doing
• Building repeats: the picker, which is what you'll use day to day
• Repeating events: the rule language behind it
• Rule reference: the full syntax
• Editing and deleting: this occurrence, or all of them
• How Calendite differs: why any of this is shaped the way it is
• Troubleshooting: if something isn't behaving