Alarms

Alarms ("Reminders") can be set on any event to trigger an alarm in advance of an event. Up to five separate alarms can be assigned to an event (at this time, Pimlical/Desktop only handles two alarms).

Setting an Alarm

To set an alarm, go into the Edit Dialog (brief tap on event in Event Selection List, or Long press on event in Day/Day+ views) and scroll down to the alarm section. To set an alarm click on the green + button or the button next to the Alarm label if it says No Alarm. In the alarm dialog, the title shows how long in advance of the event time the alarm is currently being set.  You can either click on the drop-down list at the top of the dialog which has common preset values, or use the [+] button to advance the time by 1 or [-] to move it backwards by 1. A long press on the button advances/moves backwards by 10. To clear an alarm, click on the None button.

Note: due to a limitation in the Android calendar, if the item is in an Android calendar, alarms must be set a minimum of one minute in advance of the Event time - if you set an alarm at 0 seconds, it has to be changed to 1 minute to be compatible. This limitation only exists if alarms are being managed by the built-in Android calendar application rather than by Pimlical (See Alarm section of help for details). 

Post Start Time Alarms

Post-start time alarms (i.e. alarms set with a negative value that trigger after the start time) are only supported in the Local Calendar. For example, if you set an alarm at -1h (instead of the normal 1h), then it will trigger one hour AFTER the start time of the event. This can be useful when you want to have an alarm go off before the end time of an event (example: you are a doctor and have one hour appointments with clients and want to have a vibrating alarm go off five minutes before the end time of the appointment - set the alarm to -55m).

Alarm Preferences

There are several alarm preferences that make it easier to create events that have an alarm already set on them:

ApplyAlarmPresetToAppts - If true, an alarm preset is applied to every appointment, using the ApptAlarmPreset value

ApptAlarmPreset - The preset for the primary alarm expressed as a duration string (such as 30m or 4d 8h).  A positive value means BEFORE (normal case) and negative value means AFTER (not necessarily supported on all platforms). This preset is not applied to untimed events, only timed events (see workaround if you want to apply alarm presets to untimed events).

ApplySecondaryAlarmPresetToAppts  - if true, a secondary alarm preset is applied to every appointment, using the ApptSecondaryAlarmPreset value

ApptSecondaryAlarmPreset - The preset for the secondary alarm expressed as a duration string (such as 30m or 4d 8h).  A positive value means BEFORE (normal case) and negative value means AFTER (not necessarily supported on all platforms). If there is no primary alarm preset, and there IS a Secondary Alarm preset then the preset will be applied to untimed events.

ApplyAlarmPresetToFloats - If true, an alarm preset is applied to every Floating event, using the FloatAlarmPreset value

FloatAlarmPreset - The preset for the primary alarm expressed as a duration string (such as 30m or 4d 8h).  A positive value means BEFORE (normal case) and negative value means AFTER (not necessarily supported on all platforms). The preset is not applied to untimed events (see below for workaround).

ApplySecondaryAlarmPresetToFloats - If true, an alarm preset is applied to every Floating event, using the FloatSecondaryAlarmPreset value

FloatSecondaryAlarmPreset - The preset for the secondary alarm expressed as a duration string (such as 30m or 4d 8h).  A positive value means BEFORE (normal case) and negative value means AFTER (not necessarily supported on all platforms). If there is no primary alarm preset, and there IS a Secondary Alarm preset then the preset will be applied to untimed floating events.

Upcoming Alarms

There is a menu item to view all the upcoming alarms sorted in chronological order - this can be useful to ensure that no alarms are going to go off unexpectedly in a meeting, etc. The list is like the Event Selection List, so a brief tap brings up the item for editing and a long-press invokes the Popup Command List.

Alarms that are snoozed will display the legend [z] to indicate the alarm has already rung, but was snoozed to a future time.

The next alarm to trigger is registered with the Android OS, so any other third party application that is monitoring the Android OS alarms may display this alarm. Note too, that the advance of Floating Events is triggered off an alarm as well and THAT alarm may also show up in third party apps (if so, it will display whatever you have set as the Floating Advance time - the default value is 2am).