The main place to change the attributes of an item is in the Edit Dialog. This is a large scrolling dialog that allows you to edit and manage all the attributes of an event.
The Edit Dialog is entered either by a brief tap on an event selection list, or by a long press directly on an event in the Day or Day+ views. If the item is a repeat item, a repeat exception dialog appears first to determine if the change you are about to make applies to the entire repeat series, just the current instance of the repeat series, or to this and all future occurrences of the repeat series.
The Dialog title bar of the Edit Dialog is always the first part of the text of the description field for the item (or a legend indicating you are creating a new item). When creating a new item, by default the on-screen keyboard will appear. If editing an existing item, the on-screen keyboard does not appear - but this behavior is controlled by the preference ShowSoftInputKeyboard. Each line in the Edit dialog is covered below.
Title
The title for the event. This is also referred to as the "description" field in some calendar applications. By default, each word is capitalized in the title, but a preference (AutoCapitalizeEventTitle) can be set to false if you don't like this feature.
Start +
This field allows you to set the start time and date for an event. Tapping the start time brings up the Time Picker, and tapping the Date field brings up the Date Picker. Pimlical uses its own date/time pickers by default as they are faster and more efficient, but there is a preference to use the standard Android date/time pickers if you prefer. If you are changing a repeat event to a non-repeat event, remove the repeat status first before making any other changes (in particular do this before changing the date of the event). You cannot change the date of a floating event to a date in the past (if you are changing the float to a regular event, do that first, before you try and change the date). In the unlikely case where you do need to set the date of a floating event to the past, temporarily change the status to Completed and make the date change, then change the status back to Normal.
Duration Locking
When changing the start time, the duration of the event is normally maintained, so it will also adjust the end time by the same amount. If you long-press the Start time field to change the start time, the duration will not be maintained and the end time remains unchanged. You can also toggle this duration lock on and off by tapping the lock symbol just beneath the Start+ legend
End +
This field allows you to set the ending time and date for an event. If the time is set to the same time as the start time, this field will be left blank. Similarly, if the ending date is the same as the start date, the field will be left blank. A long press (signalled by the + sign) on either the end time or date fields will bring up the duration dialog that allows you to specify the ending date and time based upon the duration of the event. Just tap the None button to set a zero-duration for the event.
Where (Location or Phone #)
The Where field allows you to specify
a location or phone number for the event. If no value has been set yet, there is an edit
field where you can type in the location or phone number for the event. If you format this as a
reasonable address value, it will subsequently display as a map-link that will
invoke your mapping application when tapped. Or if you type in a phone number it will display a phone icon and when tapped
can invoke the phone dialer, etc.). Alternatively, you can tap the Pencil icon
to the right of the field ()
and a list of all locations in the database is presented from which you
can select a location. The list of locations is built dynamically every
time it's needed (there is no permanent location list stored anywhere).
You can use the preference: IgnoreUniqueLocations
set to True to avoid displaying locations that only appear once in the
calendar database (default is false). The Remove button will remove the location (or phone) from the event.
You can also type in a portion of a location and then tap the Pencil icon - only those locations which contain the specified text will then be displayed in the list.
Once a value has been entered, it is then displayed as a non-editable field and may feature an address that can invoke the mapping application or phone dialer. In order to change this value you tap the Pencil icon on the right side at which point the address is displayed along with a button to Remove the Address (or phone number) from this event and a button to Edit the address. The feature of linking to the mapping application or phone dialer is an Android feature which your device may or may not support.
The
use of this field for a phone number is determined by the preponderance
of numbers in this field (specfically if the field has two or fewer
letters). Labels for phone numbers (in square brackets) are ignored for
the purposes of this determination. If you put a phone number in this
field, then a Phone Icon ( ) is displayed instead of the normal Map icon (
). You can specify phone labels and include multiple phone numbers
separated by commas. Labels must be in square brackets. For example:
[Work] 512-555-1212, [Home] 512-555-1213, [Cell] 512-555-1214.
Note
The note field (sometimes referred to as the 'description' field in other calendar applications) allows you to enter more text associated with the event. There is a preference (NoteFont) that controls the font size of the text displayed in this field which may be useful if you use this feature a lot. There is also a preference (MaxLinesForNoteDisplay) which controls the maximum number of lines that are normally displayed in the Edit Dialog. If there are more lines not currently displayed, the single note icon to the left of the field is replaced by a small note icon and arrow to a larger icon and if you tap that icon, the note field is expanded so that all lines of the note are visible and the single note icon re-appears (which you can then tap to restrict the number of lines displayed to the normal value).
Note that if you view the Note field in other calendar applications (such as Google Calendar) - you may see special tags in that field enclosed in square brackets - this is normal and the only way that Pimlical can reliably store all the extended attributes that only Pimlical supports. These tags can be permanently removed if you no longer choose to use Pimlical with a feature in the debug menu - but if you use this option, all attributes associated with those tags will also be permanently lost.
Hyper
This field is only displayed if the description, note or a custom field for this item contains a hyperlink (web or email). If such a link is present, this field is displayed in blue along with all the hyperlinks for this item. if there is only one hyperlink, clicking on this button invokes the hyperlink - otherwise, a selection list appears so you can pick a specific link. See the note below on Web-Email Links for further information on this feature.
Repeat
The repeat field allows you to set either a regular or irregular recurring pattern for the event. See the section on repeats for further information. If you are changing a repeat event to a non-repeat event, remove the repeat status first before making any other changes (in particular do this before changing the date of the event).
Alarm
This field allows you to set up to five alarms associated with this event. Not all calendar applications that you sync to necessarily allow that many alarms, in which case the extra alarms may be ignored by that application. To add an alarm, tap on the [+] button to the right of the Alarm field. To remove an alarm, tap on the alarm button and then tap on the None button to remove it. Alarms are always sorted in the chronological order in which they will fire (i.e. the earliest alarm will be listed first).
Status
Below the Alarm field are five radio buttons
to specify the status for the event: Normal, Completed, Canceled, Deferred and Absent.
A completed event will display a green checkmark, while a canceled event will
display a red X. A canceled or absent event will always have its text
struckthrough on the display. By default completed events will also
have struckthrough text, although you can avoid that by setting the preference
StrikethroughCompletedItems to false. There is also a preference to
automatically force a canceled event to zero duration (
SetZeroDurationIfCanceled ) to avoid blocking out time which is, however,
normally defaulted to false (so set this to true if you want to force a zero
duration when canceling an event). When changing an event's status from Normal to Canceled or Absent, the event Type is set to Free to put it in the background where it won't cause overlapping events to be indented. A Deferred
status is a convenient way of marking an event that was originally
going to display at a designated time, but is now being deferred to
some future date (which is not known). The Absent status is used to indicate that while the event was not canceled, you are not going to be attending the event.
The system icons associated with each status type other than Normal are also displayed right beneath the Status legend.
Icon
You can associated up to four icons with the event. Icons are simple graphics that help in the identification of the event - especially in tight views (such as the Month+ view). They can also be used in the Find function to selectively find just those events that contain a specific icon. Pimlical comes with a default icon collection to which you can add items - see the section on Icons. Any icons also associated with the current calendar or category will also be displayed.
To remove an icon, click on the icon you want to remove, and then tap the Remove button in the icon selection dialog (this removes the icon from your event, not from the icon collection).
If you have an icon selected, Pimlical will display the icon page that contains that icon and highlight that icon. If you have no icon selected, Pimlical will either bring up the first page of icons, or, if the preference IconStartWithRecentList is set to True (default is false), with a page of your most recently accessed icons (with the most recently accessed icon in the top position). With the Recent Icon Page displayed, you can long-press any icon to either (a) move it to the top of the list, or (b) remove it from the Recent icon list. The recent list of icons is maintained in a text file with the name RecentIconList.txt. This contains a list of all the icon ID's separated by a comma. You can force this file to be read-only by inserting the text .NoUpdate at the very beginning of the file. Spaces and End of line codes are ignored in this file. So if you want a permanent version of your Recent Icon Page, you can select icons and move them around until they are in a satisfactory order, and then edit the file to insert .NoUpdate at the start of the file to avoid having Pimlical make any further changes to that file.
Floating
The floating checkbox allows you to specify that this event is a floating event or task. If you check this box, the Advance field disappears (because you cannot set an advance on a floating event) and instead a Task checkbox appears so you can alternatively mark the event as a task (see section What are Floating Events for more information on floating events and tasks). A Due Date field also appears in which you can specify a due date for the floating event or task. if there is no due date, the item simply floats along in the schedule as an active item. If there is a due date, a count down field appears showing how many days are left to the due date, or how many days have passed if it is past-due.
Below the due date field, two new fields appear: Priority and Urgency. you can control whether these fields appear for appointments (normally they are hidden) or whether you just want to use one of those fields for floating events and tasks. You can set up to nine priority levels, where 1 is considered the highest priority and 9 the lowest - or you can select the hyphen to indicate there is no priority associated with the item. There are four Urgency levels (A-D) with A being the most urgent and D the least urgent, or you can use the hyphen to indicate there is no urgency setting. These can be useful in setting up floating events or tasks in a manner similar to that suggested by Franklin-Covey. The difference between urgency and priority is significant. For example, you might have a reminder task to reduce stress in your life. This may be very important (1), but of low urgency (D) - since it is not something you have to do today. Equally, you might have a reminder of the last day to buy a lottery ticket - that may not be very important (9), but is very urgent (A) as if you let it go one day past-due you very definitely won't be able to buy that lottery ticket.
Advance
The Advance checkbox appears on appointments and tasks only. If you check this box, you can then set an advance on the current item, so an advance reminder appears in today's schedule. For example, if the event has a 10day advance and it is now 10 or fewer days until the event, an advance reminder appears in today's schedule with a down-count as to how many days are left to the event. This is very handy for automatically getting a reminder about upcoming birthdays or anniversaries. You can also set advances on tasks so you get a notification in today's schedule about upcoming tasks. The advance matches the original event except that Repeat and Meeting information is always stripped out of advances, and you can also use a preference to put the reminder in a different category (PutAdvanceInDifferentCategory), to make the reminder always an untimed event (DefaultIsUntimedAdvances) or an Action-Tag to strip off all alarms from just this reminder (NoAlarmOnReminder).
Group
The group field allows you to create arbitrary groups into which items are placed. You can list all items in a particular group in the Find function. There's also a popup command to find all items associated with the group of the selected item. To create a new group, tap on the button (Manage Groups....) and a dialog appears with all the currently available groups in the database. You can select any number of groups to put the item in, or create a new group by tapping the New button. A group is automatically removed when there are no items present in that group.
In the local calendar, you would likely use categories to separate out different classes of items, but in handling the Android calendar (which does not support categories) you can use the Group field to perform a similar function. You can also use Groups to associate items with multiple groups, when the category selection is set to single-select mode.c
Categ. (Category)
This
field is only displayed for items in the local Pimlical calendar. The
Android calendar does not support categories, so this field does not
appear on events in Android calendars.
The category field allows you to assign one
or more categories to an event. The preference MultipleCategorySelection
can be set to true which would allow you to assign an item to any number of
categories. If set to false (default setting), you can only select one category at a time, and
selecting one category automatically deselects the previous category. All events
must be assigned to at least one category - it will be Unfiled if no
other category is assigned to an item.
Categories are used to sort groups of events (like Personal, business, spouse, etc.) and you can set default colors and defaults icons for categories to make it easy to distinguish them on the calendars. Any explicitly assigned icon or color will overwrite this default setting.
Also, if you tap this item, you can also add new or remove existing categories. You can define the default category in which an item is to appear with the preference DefaultApptCategory (or for a float, with DefaultFloatCategory or for a task with DefaultTaskCategory).
Caldr. (Calendar)
The Calendar field allows you to specify which calendar the item is to appear in. You can preset a default calendar with the preference DefaultApptCategory (or DefaultFloatCategory or DefaultTaskCategory). When moving an item between calendars, Pimlical/Android will make a copy of the existing item and then delete the original as the Android calendar does not always properly support moving calendar items otherwise.
Type
Below the Calendar field are four radio buttons that specify a Type for the item: Busy, Free, Tent.[ative] and Out [of Office]. Items are normally created with a type of Busy (although there are preference settings: DefaultApptType, DefaultFloatType which can select a different, default type). A busy item blocks out time in the display an causes other items that overlap to be indented against it. An item that is marked as Free by default works the same way, but there is a preference ( FreeTypeIndentsEvents ) that can be set to false to avoid having other events indented against them. This can be useful when handling say a spouse's calendar where you don't want to see your own events indented, or perhaps when handling an event that spans several days and is blocking out ALL the intervening time. The Tentative type can be used for events whose date/time or existence is not certain - a special icon always appears on events that are marked as tentative. If the type is other than Busy, the system icon associated with that type is displayed immediately below the Type legend.
Private
An item can be marked as private in which case Pimlical handles it specially in the various views. By default, the filters in Pimlical/Android are set to the Mask condition which means the event will be displayed, but the text will be masked in all views. At this time, this is designed just to prevent someone else casually looking at the calendar and seeing the event. In future, a password-protected access mechanism (like the one in Pimlical/Desktop) will be added. You can modify the default filter in Pimlical/Desktop to hide all private events or to display all of them. There is also a filter Show_Private included in the installation that displays all private events as some calendar applications erroneously mark all items as private (this does not affect the built-in calendar which does nothing special with this setting). A padlock icon appears underneath the Private legend if the item is locked.
Color
Tap the F/B to the left of the Color label to set a custom foreground and/or background color for the current item. This color will override the default calendar or category color. See the help section on color for more information about how colors and color schemes are handled.
Font
The Font button allows you to set a custom font, font-size or style for this item. Font sizes are handled with a list of sizes specified in the preference ListOfFontSizes. This is a list of platform-dependent font sizes that are designed to match the fontsizes used in Pimlical/Desktop. Depending on the resolution of your screen, you may wish to adapt this list to better match the sizes used in Pimlical/desktop. Most Android devices come with Serif, SansSerif and monospace fonts - but some devices have a lot more fonts (Pimlical/Android interrogates the Android OS to get a list of available fonts). Not all font sizes and styles are available in all fonts. If you pick a combination that the Android OS does not recognize, the change will simply be ignored. This can be very useful for handling important events. While setting a priority or urgency may be helpful, there's nothing like setting a really large font with say white on a red background - it stands out so well, it can not be missed!
When a custom font is set for an item, a new Remove button appears to the right of the font button to allow you to remove the custom font setting.
Create Link +
The Create Link button allows you to link this appointment to one or more contacts and/or memos. When you tap this button, a list of all your contacts appears in search mode so you can quickly locate a contact. If there are one or more links present, the label of this button changes to Edit Link. You can view the linked contact or memo either with the popup command Show Linked Contact or by clicking on this button in the Edit Dialog. To set a link to a memo, long-press the Create Link + button, or use the popup command Set Link to Memo.
New Tag
This button allows you to create a special Action Tag for the current item. This is used to setup birthdays and anniversaries, or to specify that a template has a fixed time or to suppress the voice alarm on the item etc. See the section on Action Tags for further information about using Action Tags.
Mtng. (Meeting)
This button either displays Add Attendees or Manage Attendees (x) where 'x' is the number of attendees currently designated for the meeting. Click on this button to add, edit or delete attendees for the current meeting. Some calendar applications automatically make every event a meeting with a single attendee of the owner. To avoid having the meeting icon set on every event, the preference NoMeetingIconIfOnlyOneAttendee is by default set to true - especially since it makes little sense to have a meeting with only person present - but you can also change this preference to false if you want to see the meeting icon under these circumstances.
See the section Meeting Information for further information on handling meetings.
Custom Fields
If an item has a custom field, the four custom calendar fields are always displayed. Otherwise, they will only display if the preference ShowCustomFieldsInDialogs is set to true. So if you plan to use custom fields, be sure to set this preference to true. Custom fields are synced to the custom fields in Pimlical/Desktop and can be used for any purpose. The Find function will also display these fields if this preference is set, so you can use custom fields to perform selective searches on the database (example: you might use a custom field for an Account number if you are tracking time spent on various accounts, etc.). There is also a preference UseCustomFieldForSetLink which will use one of the four custom fields to store the URL set by the Set Link To File popup command.
Image Path
This field will only display if the preference HideImagePathFieldInEditDialog is set to false. This field allows you to assign an image to an event. The image will be displayed in the Edit dialog, and also in the Day and Day+ views provided that there is room to display the image. So this feature works best when you have an event that spans several hours and you want to provide an immediate visual clue for the event. When you tap this field, you will either get an image picker or a File Navigator (depending on the setting of the preference UseFileNavigatorForImages (default is false), that will allow you to select an image. If an image has already been selected, you first get a dialog asking you if you want to select a New Image, or to Remove the image or View the image in full screen mode. Any image you select will be copied to the Pimlical/PimlicalImages folder. This allows you to keep the contents of the PimlicalImages folder in P/D and P/A the same, so that if you synchronize events across the platform, the images will display on both platforms since the paths will be identical. Note that only the path is stored as a field for the calendar event, not the image itself. If the image is moved or deleted, it will simply disappear from the event.
If the image is not rotated properly in the display (some images do not contain, or may have spurious, orientation information etc.) - you can insert the string (+90) or (-90) into the filename to correspondingly rotate it clockwise or counter-clockwise. So instead of a filename like Funmobile.png, you could have Funmobile(-90).png to have it rotated counter-clockwise by 90 degrees.
Ok, Cancel and Delete buttons
At the bottom of the dialog are the Ok and Cancel buttons that function to either lock in all the changes you have made or to discard them. The Delete button deletes the current item. In particular, it will delete the entire repeat series if you call up a repeat series into this dialog. Note that the delete function on the popup command list may only delete the displayed instance, so you need to use the Edit Dialog to delete an item if it is a repeat series and you want to remove the entire series. Alternatively, you can use the multi-select button in an event selection list, which will then display a dialog that allows you to delete the entire repeat series of all selected events you are deleting.
The back button functions as the Ok button (i.e. it will lock in all the changes made in the Edit Dialog).
Web/Email Links
You can set a link to any file that Pimlical has access to in local storage (typically any folder, except for folders owned by other third party applications), or to any web page on the internet (by including the full URL). To set a link to a file in local storage, use the Set Link To File popup command on the event in an event selection list. You can also manually copy any URL to these fields in the event: Description, Note, or any of the four custom fields. It is quite simple when a page is displaying, for example in the Chrome browser, to tap on the address field at which point there is a copy icon that allows you to copy the full URL to that page. You can then switch back to Pimlical and paste the URL into the appropriate field.Last Revised:08Sep2012