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Usage Overview: Frigcal

This page is a copy of this app's Help screen, styled for better reading online. If you've already read the info in Help, you may want to skip ahead to the app-packages page for install and start-up details. For coverage of this app's usage, read on here.

This page's sections present the essentials needed to use this app well. They explore:

• Introduction
• Menu
• Gestures
  • Date Navigation
  • Days and Events
  • Main Menu
  • Back and Exit
  • Event Dialog
• Calendars
• Settings
• Colors
• Installs

Introduction

Welcome to Frigcal: calendars made simple, portable, and private.

This doc is a quick start that covers usage essentials. This app's usage is centered around:

• A main menu of actions opened with a button tap or right swipe
• Touch-screen gestures that are also available for touchpads and mice
• Calendar files that you manage with normal file tools and operations

The following sections cover each of these topics in turn, followed by tips for settings, colors, and installs.

Menu

This app's main menu, also called a navigation drawer, is the primary navigation tool of Frigcal. It is opened and closed by tapping the three-bar hamburger button at the top right of each screen. You can also open the menu by swiping rightwards from the display's left edge and can close it by tapping anywhere outside it.

The menu indicates the currently displayed screen with gray shading. It allows you to switch to month, search, and settings screens; change the colors theme; open go-to and new-calendar dialogs; save changed calendars; and navigate without gestures.

Most menu actions are self-explanatory. Of note: if you have no prior calendars to use on first run, you'll use the menu's New Calendar to create a new calendar and its Save Calendars to write the new calendar's file to your calendar folder.

Some main-menu items open temporary popups and may redirect you to the next screen. For example, the Go To item opens a date-input popup, which in turn opens a selected date's Month screen. Navigation items in the menu also open the Month screen per the corresponding gestures of the next section.

Gestures

Use the following gestures to view and manage your calendars. The direction of swipes may depend on your device settings, and the way you invoke gestures varies per input device. On touch screens, use the gestures as described. On touch pads and mice, swipes might use press-hold-and-move, two-finger gestures, or scroll wheels.

Date Navigation

The Month screen displays days in weeks that for simplicity always begin with Sunday. On this screen:

• Swipe left and right to move to the next and prior month, respectively. Use either short swipes above the days grid or long swipes anywhere without events (e.g., in the bottom week row).
• Swipe up and down to move to the next and prior year, respectively. Use the same lengths and locations as left and right swipes.
• Double-tap anywhere to go to today's month and day.
• Tap Go To in the main menu to pick and jump to a specific date.

Days and Events

The Month screen display days, which in turn display events. On days and events:

• Swipe up, down, left, and right to scroll the events on a day. Use short swipes on the events.
• Single-tap an event on a day to open it in the event dialog (see ahead). Once open, you may view, edit, delete, or copy the event. Tap Update to save changes.
• Single-tap a day's number to add or list events for that day:
  • Days without events open an empty event dialog for adding a new event. Tap Create to save the new event.
  • Days with events open a larger and scrollable list of all events on that day. Tap an event in the list to open it in the event dialog, or tap the list's Add to open an empty event dialog for adding a new event.
• Long-press a day's number to paste onto that day the event most recently copied in the event dialog. The pasted event appears in a prefilled event dialog. Tap Update to save the event.

Main Menu

The main menu, described earlier, is available on every screen in this app. On all screens:

• Single-tap the hamburger button or swipe rightwards from the app's left edge to open the main menu.
• Singe-tap anywhere outside the main menu or swipe leftwards anywhere to close the main menu.
• Swipe up and down to scroll the main menu and reveal additional options.

Back and Exit

This app's close gestures vary by device category:

• On Android, the system back button or gesture returns to the Month screen from other screens or prompts to confirm app exit on the Month screen.
• On PCs, the escape key returns to the Month screen from other screens, and both the escape key and window close button prompt to confirm app exit if there are unsaved calendar changes.

Event Dialog

The event dialog, opened by gestures above, allows you to view, edit, delete, and copy an event. It includes a one-line Title, a multiple-line Note with automatic word wrapping, and Calendar and Category choices, the latter of which is used to colorize an event's overscore bar (see Colors ahead). The entire dialog scrolls to reveal more Note text.

To ease edits, text fields display handles and a Cut/Copy/Paste bubble on text selection and a Select All/Paste bubble on long-presses. Text fields also support keyboard combinations where available: with key control (or command on macOS), type C, X, V, A, Z, and R for copy, cut, paste, select all, undo, and redo, respectively. Handles and bubbles may be disabled in Settings for keyboard-only use.

In the event dialog itself, tap Update or Create to save changes, and use its Copy or Copy plus Delete to copy or cut for long-press pasting in the Month screen (e.g., to repeat or move events). The latter also enables calendar-field changes in the pasted event.

Calendars

In this app, calendars are simply files in a folder, which you can manage with normal file operations. Calendar changes made in this app are applied in memory and written to files only when you choose Save Calendars in the main menu. Here's more info about this model.

This app asks you to select a folder for storing your calendar files whenever it requires access to one. This can occur on the first run, startup load, main-menu Save Calendar, and Settings folder change, and uses the system chooser on Android and a custom chooser on PCs. You can use any accessible folder on your device and may change your chosen folder at any time in the Settings screen.

Once chosen, the calendar folder stores one ICS file for every calendar you make or use in this app. ICS files follow the iCalendar standard, which makes them portable to other devices and programs. They are named with a .ics extension and use the broad Unicode UTF-8 text encoding. To manage ICS files, this app:

• Loads all the calendar files in the calendars folder on both startup of the app and folder changes in Settings
• Saves changed calendars to their files in the calendars folder on main-menu Save Calendars
• Prompts you to save if you try to close this app or change folders when there are unsaved calendar changes

Additional calendar essentials:

Sharing

To share calendars with other programs or devices, either copy calendar ICS files to or from the calendars folder (e.g., in a file-explorer app), or choose a calendars folder in this app that is part of regularly synced content (e.g., in a folder tree managed by quixotely.com's PC-Phone USB Sync app). Unlike some calendar apps, Frigcal does not require imports and exports to use ICS files.

Backups

Also in the calendars folder, this app saves backup copies of the ICS calendar files it changes. These backups are made before every write to an ICS file, and show up in the calendar folder's _Backups subfolder, named with backup date and time plus the original ICS file's name. To restore your calendar files from these backups, rename them to discard their date and time, and move them one level up to your calendars folder. The _Backups subfolder is self-cleaning, per a Max backups number-files-per-calendar limit in Settings.

Clouds

On Android, the calendars-folder chooser allows you to pick a folder on any available content medium, including internal storage and clouds. If you choose to host your calendars folder remotely, please be aware that your files will be transmitted from and to your provider on loads and saves and are only as private and secure as your provider's interfaces. Local storage is generally recommended.

Settings

The Settings screen lets you manage color theme, font size, backups, calendar folder, and more. The choices you make in it are saved in a file (in JSON format) so they can be restored on each run. Use this screen's Save to save its settings to the file, and use its Restore to reset options to their original values (followed by Save if desired).

The settings file is not generally useful to users but can be copied on PCs to sync settings. Its location is platform specific:

• On Windows and Linux, it's in this app's install folder, where you unzipped the download and where the executable resides.
• On macOS, it's in the ~/Libraries/Frigcal subfolder of your home folder.
• On Android, it's in this app's private storage and automatically synced to and from your Google ID account when this is enabled.

No changes to items in Settings are saved permanently to this file unless you tap its Save, except for Calendars folder, which is auto-saved after all folder asks for convenience, and is not reset to empty or a prior path on Restore. Whether saved or not, changes made in Settings are applied in the running App.

Tips: Color theme always reflects main-menu Theme toggles, and Font size is an alternative to font or zoom settings on the underlying host device.

Colors

Color theme in both the main menu and Settings selects an overall app motif. Colors may also be applied to event overscore bars in the Month screen and event-list dialog, per event category names. Choose a color for an event by selecting from preset colors in that event's Category field in the event dialog.

For simplicity, event category is a predefined color name, and calendars are not colorized. This ensures that event colors work the same on all devices without settings syncs. For users of legacy Frigcal, a script converts former calendar and category colors to the new category color names: see convert_legacy_colors.zip either in the tools folder of app PC installs or online at this page.

Tips: to use the default yellow accent color, pick the (none) category, which is the same as no category and unknown category. To show no color at all, pick the black or white categories, which match the background color of the Month screen and event-list dialog in Dark and Light themes, respectively.

Installs

For Android, install this app from the Google Play store. For Windows, macOS, and Linux PCs, install this app from quixotely.com using this page on this website. Each PC platform's version of this app is provided as a zipfile, which you'll download and unzip on your devices. Platform tips:

• On Android, install this app from Google Play at this link. Launch this app by tapping its icon in the apps screen and uninstall with your device's usual procedure. The Android app is also available on quixotely.com as a sideloadable APK file; see this page.
• On Windows, the unzip makes a folder that contains the Frigcal.exe executable, which you can run with a click in File Explorer. Please unzip in a writeable folder, not in C:\Program Files. To uninstall, delete this app's unzipped folder. Windows may ask you to approve this app on first run by clicking More info and then Run anyway.
• On macOS, the unzip makes a Frigcal.app package folder, which you can run with a click in Finder and move to Applications for convenience. To uninstall, delete the package folder. Optional: to avoid first-run approval steps on macOS, remove this app's quarantine flag with Terminal command xattr -c /path.../Frigcal.app.
• On Linux, the unzip makes a folder that contains the Frigcal executable, which you can run with a click in a file explorer. To uninstall, delete this app's unzipped folder. This is an Ubuntu 24 executable, which will not run on all Linux hosts. If executable runs fail, please instead use the source-code package described next.

The apps and executables above provide seamless user experiences and are recommended for most users. As an alternative, the app's open-source code is provided in its source-code package, both for vetting the app and as a fallback option if the apps or executables will not run due to library or host skew.

To view or run the source-code package, fetch it from this link and unzip. Source-code runs (only) are started by launching the package's main.py script and require installs of Python 3.8 or later, Kivy 2.3.1, KivyMD 1.2.0, and Pillow 10.4 or later. Launch with any script technique, such as explorer icon clicks or command lines py -3 main.py on Windows and python3 main.py elsewhere. Install Python on the host and install the others within Python using pip.

For More Info

For examples of this app in action, see this site's demos page. For the legacy version of this app, visit this site. For logistics info, app benefits, terms of use, and privacy policy, open this app's About screen or visit this app's main web page.