07 – Notifications

In this chapter you set up reminders for events and tasks and learn how to react to them.

Adding a reminder

1. Open an event or a task for editing.
2. In the Reminder field, choose how long beforehand you want to be notified (e.g. 10 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day).
3. You can add several reminders per entry.
4. Save.

How reminders appear

At the due time, Aperio shows a notification – as a system notification and/or as a hint inside the app, depending on your settings. Optionally a sound is played.

In the notification you can:

• open the entry,
• dismiss the reminder (acknowledge it),
• or snooze it – the reminder returns after the chosen time.

Per-calendar default reminders

Besides the reminders on individual entries, you can set default reminders per calendar – handy for subscribed or external calendars whose entries arrive without an alarm. Where each entry applies is your choice, and it decides whether the entry rides on top of an event’s own reminders or stands in for them (see below). Under Settings → Calendars, pick a calendar and set its default reminders there.

Each default reminder also says where it lives. Only in Aperio is what every entry starts with: Aperio reminds you itself, and nothing is written into the event – exactly how the iOS Calendar app treats its own “Default Alert Times”. Attached to new events instead writes that entry into every appointment you create in the calendar and leave without reminders of your own, as the event’s own reminder. That is what makes other apps reading the same calendar remind you too – the iOS Calendar app, or a voice assistant reading your iCloud calendar. Only appointments you create after the switch get it written in; an appointment you gave reminders of your own, or deliberately none, keeps that choice, and an event without reminders of its own still gets the entry in Aperio. Exchange and Outlook calendars store a single “minutes before” reminder, so only the first such entry is attached there; an entry at a fixed time does not reach those appointments.

An attached entry is not a surprise at save time. Create an appointment in such a calendar and the editor already shows those rows, marked on this event: they are ordinary reminder rows, so you can change the lead time, add another, or take them out again, and what you leave is what the appointment gets. Removing every row is a choice like any other — no default slides back in afterwards. Entries that stay only in Aperio are not shown there, because they are not the appointment’s: they ring on top of whatever it carries, and the calendar’s settings page is where they belong.

A default reminder can be a lead time (“before start”) or a fixed date and time. “On next app start” is missing here on purpose: it only ever fires for a reminder set on an entry itself, so as a calendar default it would be a setting that saves and then stays silent.

Apple Calendar shows two alerts

An iCloud account has a default alert of its own (iPhone: Settings → Apps → Calendar → Default Alert Times). Apple writes it into the appointment as an alarm and marks that alarm as its own default, which is how the Calendar app can tell it apart from one somebody set deliberately.

Aperio keeps that mark. Editing an appointment made on an iPhone — its title, its time, anything — leaves the alert itself alone, mark and all, so it stays Apple’s default instead of turning into an alert you appear to have set by hand. Change the reminder here, add one beside it or take it away, and the mark goes: it is your choice then, and an account that still believed the alert was its own could put its version back.

Where Aperio cannot put an alert back exactly as it found it — one it cannot read in the first place, or one written in a way this app would have to respell — it leaves the alert to the server and drops the mark rather than guess. Those appointments behave as they did before.

So an appointment Aperio creates with an attached reminder ends up with both: Apple’s default alert and Aperio’s. Apple Calendar lists them as “1st alert: default” and “2nd alert”, and a voice assistant reading the calendar may announce the appointment twice. Aperio cannot switch Apple’s default off from the outside — set Default Alert Times to None on the iPhone if you want only the reminder Aperio attaches, or leave the Aperio entry only in Aperio so nothing is written into the appointment at all.

All-day events and birthdays

All-day events have no time of day, so a reminder isn’t fired “one hour before” (i.e. the previous evening) but at the day-carryover time – the same time as your day-start reminders. A lead time counts in whole days: “1 week before” fires seven days earlier at the day-carryover time.

The same applies to the automatically generated birthday calendars — and those remind you on the day itself, at the day-carryover time, without you setting anything up. A birthday calendar exists because you want to be told, so it starts switched on.

Under Settings → Calendars (on the phone via Reminders in the calendar list) you can change that: give it a lead time such as “1 week before”, add several reminders, or remove them all — an emptied list stays empty and the calendar goes quiet.

Cancelled events

Cancelled events (for example a meeting series withdrawn by its organizer) never trigger reminders — regardless of any setting. By default they stay visible in the calendar (like Outlook); you can hide them under Settings → General via Show cancelled events. When shown, a cancelled event is dimmed with its title struck through, and screen readers announce it with a trailing “cancelled”. Deleting a single occurrence of a recurring event removes that occurrence entirely — it does not linger as a cancelled row.

Reminders only you get

Every reminder you set on an appointment says where it applies, in the same row as the time. On this appointment is what a reminder has always been: Aperio writes it into the appointment, the calendar stores it, and every other client of that calendar reminds you too – your phone’s calendar app, a voice assistant reading your account out loud, and anyone else you share the calendar with. Exchange and Outlook calendars store a single “minutes before” reminder per appointment, so only the first attached one survives there; a second, or one at a fixed time, is better set to Only in Aperio.

Only in Aperio keeps it here. The appointment on the server stays untouched, so nobody sharing the calendar sees it and no other app announces it – but your own devices do: the reminder travels through Aperio’s sync like your settings do, and rings on your phone as well as on your desktop. That is the one for “leave now” on a shared work calendar, or a personal nudge on an appointment your colleagues can read.

The choice appears only where it makes a difference. A local calendar has no other client to tell, and the calendar on your phone that Aperio only reads stores no reminder Aperio writes — in both, reminders are Aperio’s either way and no choice is offered.

Appointment identities belong to the calendar and change underneath Aperio: a re-sync can mint new ones, and some providers do it after every edit. A private reminder remembers the name and start of the appointment it was set on, so it finds it again — and Aperio keeps that note up to date as long as it can still see the appointment, so a rename or a move does not lose it either. Only if two appointments in the same calendar share a name and a start does Aperio leave the reminder where it is rather than guess, and you can set it again.

Notification sounds

You can choose which sound a reminder plays, on several levels — each one overrides the one above it:

1. Global default — Settings → Calendars → Notification sounds.
2. Per calendar / per task list — in the same settings panel, on each calendar or list row.
3. Per event / per task — in the event or task dialog (while editing an existing entry).
4. Per reminder — directly on a single reminder row.

Every level offers the same choices:

• System default — your operating system’s notification sound.
• Silent — a visual-only notification, no sound.
• Custom sound — import your own audio file (.mp3, .ogg, .wav, .m4a, .aac, .flac, up to 5 MB). Use Test to preview it and Remove to delete an imported sound.

Everything below the global level also offers Use default, which means “inherit the level above”. Imported sounds and your choices sync to your other devices (the audio file travels with the setting), so a reminder sounds the same everywhere.

Volume: Aperio deliberately has no in-app volume slider — use your operating system’s per-app volume mixer (Windows and macOS both have one).

Notification settings

In the settings under Notifications you define:

• whether system notifications are used,
• whether and which sound is played (see Notification sounds above),
• the default snooze duration,
• the default lead time for new events.

Note: For system notifications to appear, Aperio needs the corresponding permission from your operating system. You are asked for it the first time.

Screen-reader note: Reminders are announced through a live region, so you notice them even without a visible focus change. The “Open”, “Dismiss” and “Snooze” buttons are reachable with Tab and clearly labeled.

Running in the background (system tray)

So reminders fire even when the window isn’t open, Aperio can hide into the system tray instead of quitting. Under Settings → General:

• Minimize to the tray when closing – the close button hides Aperio instead of quitting.
• Minimize to the tray instead of the taskbar – the minimize button tucks the window into the tray.

Click the tray icon to bring the window back; use its menu to actually quit. Both options are off by default. If your system has no tray (e.g. GNOME without an AppIndicator extension), the toggles are disabled and the window behaves normally.

Launch at login

So reminders fire again after a restart without you opening Aperio by hand, turn on “Launch Aperio when I sign in” under Settings → General → Startup. Aperio then starts automatically once you log in to this computer. A second option, “Start minimized in the system tray” (on by default when a tray is available), controls whether the autostart launch opens a window or starts tucked in the tray — click the tray icon to bring it up. The settings apply to this device only; clear the checkbox to turn autostart off again.

Summary

You can create reminders, set their sounds and respond to them with dismiss or snooze. Next up is search.