Handling Dates

The format for dates is managed by preferences within Pimlical (so you can have different settings from the system settings). To set the date order, use the preference: DateOrder which can have values of:

mdy    Month, day, year - typical for USA
dmy    Day, Month, Year - typical for most other countries
ymd    Year, Month, Day - typical for Scandinavian and other countries
iso      Use ISO Standard for date order (currently same as ymd)

In addition, there are preferences to set the desired characters for these functions:

A duration value is a string like 4d3h20m (four days, three hours, 20 minutes).

By default, Pimlical uses its own Date Picker to set dates. If you prefer to use the standard, Android Date Picker, you can set the preference UsePimlicalDateTimePicker to False and Pimlical will then use the Android Date Picker.

Using the Date Picker

To select the year, tap on the drop-down list at the bottom left of the dialog. To set the month, tap on one of the twelve month buttons at the top of the dialog. To select the day, tap on one of the day buttons. Tapping on the day button also sets that date and closes the dialog, so be sure to select the month and year first.

Days outside of the current month are displayed with a darker gray background, but can still be used to select that day (in the prior or next month). The currently selected month and day are indicated with blue highlighing, while the day that corresponds to today (if the month and year are set to the today's month and year) is higlighted in red.

To quickly move to the prior year, you can double-tap the Jan button, or to move to the next year, you can double-tap the Dec button (i.e. if January is selected and you tap the Jan button, it moves to January in the prior year).

The Today button sets today's date and closes the dialog.

The None button is displayed only if it is a valid selection (i.e. a Date preference can be set to no date, but an event can not have no date). That clears any date selection and closes the dialog.

Week Numbers and Day Numbers

If Week numbers are displayed (Preference: DisplayWeekNumbers set to True), a Week # button is displayed that brings up a dialog with a button for every week of the year - tap that week to set the date to the starting day of that week.

To see what week number a day is in, long-press the day button. That long-press will also display the day of the year as well as the offset +/- from Today. And it will also set the Pinned Date. In the main view, you can long-press the right arrow button on the command bar to go instantly to the currently Pinned Date. The Pinned Date is only remembered in the current session and is not saved permanently. This provides a useful way to see how long ago an event occurred - locate the event, tap on the Start Date, then long press the selected day and you can see how many days prior to today the event was.

Definition of Week Numbers

Pimlical uses the ISO standard for week numbers which mandates that the first week of the year is the week which includes a Thursday. However, that standard also mandates that Monday be the start of the week. Since Pimlical allows any day to be the start of the week, it extends the intent of the ISO standard by defining the start of the week as the first week which contains the first four days of that week.

For example, if Sunday is the start of the week (common in the USA), then it is the first week that has a Wednesday, or if Saturday is the start of the week (some Middle Eastern countries), then it is the first week that has a Tuesday.

You can override the ISO definition and use any day of the year to set the starting week number. For example, suppose you want to know how many weeks you are into a pregnancy - by setting the preference FirstWeekOfThisYear to the calculated date of conception, Pimlical will then display the number of weeks into the pregnancy at any point where week numbers are displayed. You can also set the preference FirstWeekOfNextYear to set the first week of the following year.

If you want to use a custom week number AND still keep the ISO week numbers (or perhaps normally don't even want to display week numbers) you can set up a Filter, called say Pregnancy and mark it as having a custom preference file, and only in that custom preference file do you override the week number definitions. Or you could set those preferences for the Widget filter so just the widget would display the week of the pregnancy.

In any event, before emailing Tech Support complaining that week numbers are wrong based upon what you see in other calendars, be sure that (a) you have Monday defined as the start of the week, and (b) you do not have custom, override values for the start of the week!

Date Range

The range of valid dates is from January 1, 1900 through December 31, 2099. Remember that if you sync with other calendar applications, many other calendar applications do not have as large a range of dates, and may therefore change the year so it is within the range of valid dates for that application.

When setting the start date of an anniversary that is outside of this date range, remember that you can specify any year by using an Action Tag.

Day Number font too big for button (so two-digit numbers are truncated)