03 – Events

In this chapter you create, edit and move events and set up recurrences.

Creating an event

Switch to a calendar view (e.g. Week, see Chapter 06).
Use the arrow keys to navigate to the day or time you want.
Create an event: Quick add event (Ctrl+N) opens the quick dialog, New event (Ctrl+Shift+N) the full form — or via the context menu. The currently selected time is suggested as the start.
In the dialog, enter at least a title.

In the event dialog you can also set:

Start and end (or All day),
the calendar the event is stored in,
location and description,
a color label (with a color dot in the picker),
a reminder (see Chapter 07),
attendees (name and/or email address),
a recurrence (see below).

Start and end are linked: moving the start slides the end by the same amount, so the duration is preserved — across midnight and across several days too. Changing the end only resizes the event; an end before the start is pulled back to the start. New events begin at the next half hour (09:00 on another day) and run for one hour. This is identical on the desktop and in the mobile app.

Custom color: Next to the color-label picker there’s a “Custom color…” button. Use it to compose an arbitrary color on the fly (hex value or swatch) and apply it directly — no detour through the settings. You can optionally save it as a named label in your palette at the same time. The sidebar offers the same thing via the Color → Other… context menu on calendars and lists.

Recoloring a single event: Besides the dialog, you can recolor an event directly from its right-click menu (the Color submenu) — handy for a quick tweak without opening the full form. Where the calendar’s provider can store a per-event color (local calendars and color-capable CalDAV servers), the color travels with the event and shows up in other clients too. For iCloud, Google, Exchange/Outlook and subscribed feeds, the color is kept locally on this device instead (so it never triggers a sync error), and it stays applied just the same.

Subscribed calendars: If a calendar you subscribe to (an iCal feed) sets its own per-event colors, those now show through as well — read-only, since a subscribed feed can’t be edited.

Save creates the event; a live region confirms “Event saved”.

Notify attendees: When an event has attendees and the calendar supports server-side scheduling (iCloud, Google, Exchange/Outlook), a Notify attendees checkbox appears (on by default). When ticked, the provider sends invitations or updates automatically on save – Aperio itself never sends email.

When you delete a meeting you organize (with attendees, on an account with server-side scheduling), Aperio asks in one dialog what should happen — no hidden second step. For a recurring meeting the dialog has a Notify attendees / Remove without notifying radio group (default: notify) and, below it, a button for each scope: this occurrence, this and all following, and the whole series. So you can cancel a single occurrence (attendees get a cancellation for exactly that date), end the series from a chosen date onward (this and all following keeps the earlier occurrences and drops this one plus every later one), or cancel all of it — and the radio decides in each case whether an email goes out. A single event has just the notify/silent choice. A meeting you were only invited to, or an event with no attendees, is deleted without asking. (On iCloud/CalDAV the server decides whether a cancellation goes out, so “without notifying” isn’t guaranteed there.)

Check availability: Below that toggle sits a Check availability button. It looks up, for the currently entered time window, which attendees are free or busy, and shows the result per attendee with a summary (announced via the live region). If a provider can’t answer (missing permission), that attendee reads as “free/unknown”.

Responding to invitations (RSVP): When you open a meeting you were invited to (iCloud, Google, Exchange/Outlook), Your response appears at the top of the dialog with Accept, Tentative and Decline buttons — your current reply is highlighted. Your answer is sent to the organizer automatically. If you are the organizer, you instead see each attendee’s response status.

Editing, moving and deleting events

Edit: Select the event and open it with Enter, double-click it, or choose Edit from the context menu.
Move: Change the times in the dialog – this works reliably and is screen-reader friendly. With a mouse you can also drag an event onto a different day in the week or month view (time of day and duration are preserved) or onto a calendar in the sidebar to move it to that calendar. For recurring events Aperio asks whether to move just this occurrence or the whole series.
Delete: Select the event and choose Delete (default: Delete). You are asked to confirm before deletion.

Recurring events

Under Recurrence in the event dialog you choose a pattern:

daily, weekly (with weekdays), monthly, yearly,
an end (never, after X times, until a date).

When editing or deleting a recurring event, Aperio asks up front whether the change should apply to only this occurrence, this and all following, or the whole series — the same three scopes other calendars (Google, Outlook) offer. This and all following splits the series at the chosen occurrence: the earlier occurrences stay untouched, and this one plus every later one are changed (on edit, a new series takes over from here) or removed (on delete).

Tip: Recurring events from external calendars (e.g. iCloud) expand correctly in every view – even when the first occurrence lies in the past.

Screen-reader note: When you create an event, focus moves to the dialog’s title field. Use Tab/Shift+Tab to move through the fields; Esc cancels without saving. In a view, events are announced with title, time and calendar when selected.

The same appointment in several calendars

One commitment often exists several times over: in the work calendar so colleagues see it, copied into a private calendar because that is the one a voice assistant reads out, and again in a colleague’s calendar Aperio also reads. To every provider those are unrelated events — Aperio can be told otherwise.

Open an event’s context menu (right-click, Shift+F10, or long-press on the phone) and choose Belongs together with…. The dialog lists the other events of that day; pick the twin and confirm with Group. The list reaches into switched-off calendars as well — a colleague’s calendar is often off precisely because it is noisy, and that is where the third copy sits. Those entries carry a “(calendar switched off)” note, so no event turns up out of nowhere. The same dialog takes an event back out (Take this event out) or drops the whole grouping (Dissolve group). Its members are a list, and each one opens: you get from the group straight into the editor of whichever copy you mean, and back again. On an event that is already grouped the menu entry reads Manage grouping…, so its name says there is something to manage.

Nothing reaches the provider. Grouping two events changes neither of them, and ungrouping leaves both exactly as they were — the calendars keep their own copies, Aperio just knows they are one appointment. The grouping travels between your devices with everything else.

If the second copy is the obvious one — same name, same time, another calendar — it is already picked when the dialog opens, with a line saying why. Confirming is one keystroke; disagreeing is choosing something else. Aperio never groups anything on its own: in an office full of “Team meeting” at 10:00 that would declare two different meetings one appointment, and a wrong group hides a real commitment behind a copy of something else.

If both events already belong to different groups, Aperio refuses rather than guessing: merging two claims about what an appointment is would be a decision you never asked for. Take one of them out first.

What changes once events are grouped

One row instead of four. Every view shows the appointment once, and the row says what it stands for: “one appointment with 2 others, in Work, Private”. The count is of the group, so a copy in a calendar you have switched off is counted too — it matches what you know you keep.

You can see it too: a folded row carries a small mark — “3×” for the appointment and its two other copies.

There is one exception, and it is deliberate: if the copies have drifted apart — one was moved and the others were not — they are NOT folded. Each stays visible and says so, with a highlighted mark (“3× ≠”). The group has stopped being true, and that is the one thing you need to see.

One edit instead of four. After saving a change to a grouped event, Aperio asks whether the other copies should follow, names each one it will write, and names each one it may not. A colleague’s calendar is read-only, and skipping it quietly is how a group ends up meaning two different times. The copies are named by their calendar: the title is the same on all of them — that is what makes them a group.

If something goes wrong along the way, the dialog stays open and says which calendars could not be written; Try the rest again retries exactly those. Half-carried is the one state you have to see.

Only what the appointment IS travels: title, when, where, and the description. Reminders stay with each copy — the private copy usually exists precisely because it carries a reminder the work one does not. Colour, calendar and attendees stay per copy for the same reason.

The question comes after the save, never before, so your own change is never at stake and cancelling costs nothing.

Series too, at every scope. Change this occurrence only and each copy gets what your event got: the occurrence cut out of its series and a standalone event put in its place. Choose this and all following and each copy’s series is split at the same point — the earlier occurrences stay untouched, the later ones carry the change. A copy running to a different pattern (fortnightly against weekly) is split at its OWN next occurrence; a copy with none left from there on is named rather than quietly skipped.

The dialog says which occurrences it is about. And because both scopes create NEW entries, those are tied together afterwards — otherwise the appointment you had just made one row would be four again from that point on.

The meeting belongs to the appointment. A meeting link hangs on exactly one event, and which one is a coincidence of the moment it was attached. Inside a group, Join appears on whichever copy you happen to be looking at.

Copies are found again. Event ids belong to the provider and change underneath Aperio — a re-sync remints them, moving an event between calendars remints it. A group remembers each member’s name and start, so when an id stops resolving the copy is looked for and the group repairs itself silently. If nothing matching is there, nothing is changed: it may be a copy you deleted, and dropping it on suspicion is not Aperio’s call.

Time steps

Under Settings → General, Time steps decides how far one press of the arrow keys moves a time field: 1, 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes (15 by default). A time that does not sit on that grid keeps stepping minute by minute, so nothing you already saved becomes unsavable, and typing an exact time always works.

On the phone the same setting works differently, because the platform gives no choice: the native picker’s wheel always moves a minute at a time. There, the setting decides which minutes the Minutes button beside a time field offers — one tap instead of thirty swipes to reach half past.

Signatures

A signature is a named block of text that goes at the end of a description — a room’s join details, a standing note, a department’s dial-in. Under Settings → Signatures — on the phone via Signatures in Settings — you write them. WHICH one a calendar carries is set on the calendar itself, beside its default reminders, and a calendar that has one puts it on new appointments by itself: no press at all in the ordinary case.

The binding is a default, not a restriction. Every signature stays pickable in the editor whichever calendar the appointment is on, and the Signature button beside the description is there for those exceptions — including taking one back out. Change the calendar and the block is swapped for the new calendar’s; text you wrote yourself, or a block you deleted, is left alone.

Inserting is repeatable: a second press replaces the block rather than adding another, and switching to a different signature swaps it. The text you wrote above it is never touched — a signature is an addition at the end, not a rewrite. It is separated by a line containing -- , the same marker mail clients use, which is also how Aperio finds its own block again.

Plain text only, and that is not a limitation we chose. A sent invitation travels as iCalendar, whose description field is defined as plain text — HTML put there arrives as visible tags in every client that renders it literally. Put a link on a line of its own and virtually every client will make it clickable, which is all the formatting an invitation needs.

Summary

You can create, edit, move, delete and repeat events. Next we’ll handle tasks.