Calendar & Reminders

Finalist unifies all your commitments in one place: your calendars and your Apple Reminders appear right alongside your tasks, and stay in sync with their home apps.

Calendars in Finalist

All your calendars are woven into your daily view: work meetings, personal appointments, shared and subscribed calendars. Toggle which calendars you see in the Calendars configurator under the app menu. Events stay in your Calendar app too, so you can manage them from either side.

Adding a calendar

Finalist doesn't keep a calendar system of its own. It shows the calendars already on your device, synced by the system, which is why there's no import step and no duplicates to manage. It also means new calendars are created in Apple's Calendar app, not in Finalist. Once the system knows about a calendar, it appears in Finalist automatically, on every device signed into the same accounts.

To create a calendar on iPhone or iPad, open the Calendar app, tap Calendars at the bottom, then Add Calendar. On Mac, open the Calendar app and choose File > New Calendar.

To bring in calendars from Google, Outlook, or another service, connect the account to your device: on iPhone or iPad go to Settings > Apps > Calendar > Calendar Accounts and add it there; on Mac, open Calendar and choose Calendar > Add Account. All of that account's calendars then flow into the Calendar app and into Finalist.

Subscribed calendars work too: a sports team's schedule, a school calendar, any webcal link. On iPhone or iPad, tap Calendars > Add Calendar > Add Subscription Calendar and paste the link; on Mac, choose File > New Calendar Subscription.

If a calendar you know exists isn't showing up in Finalist, check two places: the Calendars configurator's Organize Calendars list (it may just be toggled off), and the account's settings in the system (the account may have Calendar turned off). The Add Calendar button in the configurator carries a short version of this guide, so it's always at hand.

Showing a calendar as all-day

Some calendars announce things more than they schedule you: community events, club fixtures, webinar feeds. If you want to know about those events without them crowding your day's timeline, open the Calendars configurator, pick Show as All-Day in the row of options above your calendar list, and select the calendar. Timed events from that calendar then appear as all-day events, visible ahead of time but out of your schedule.

This changes only how Finalist displays them. The events keep their real times in your calendar, and editing one in Finalist opens it with its actual time. Notifications follow the real time too, so a show that airs at 21:00 still alerts you at 21:00 even though it sits in the all-day row.

Notifications from a calendar

Finalist can alert you about events on a calendar whether or not the events carry alerts of their own. In the Calendars configurator, choose Notify in the row of options above your calendar list, then tap a calendar and how you want it to alert you: at the time of the event, 5, 15 or 30 minutes before, an hour before, or Match Apple Calendar alerts, which fires only for events that already have an alert set and uses the alert's own timing.

All-day events don't have a time to count back from, so they alert at the hour set by Notify for all-day items at in Settings → Notifications.

The choice is per calendar, and you turn it off again by tapping the calendar and choosing Disabled.

Finalist works within the limit iOS puts on how many alerts an app can have waiting, and it shares that budget between your tasks, habits, events and reminders so that one busy calendar can't use it all up. If you're notified about a great many things, the ones furthest out are the ones that may not arrive.

Duplicating an event

Touch and hold an event (right-click on Mac) and choose Duplicate, then pick one of your calendars. Finalist creates a copy there, which is handy for putting a shared or subscribed event onto a calendar you own. Any of your writable calendars can be the destination, even when the original event is read-only.

One event, many calendars

When the same event appears in more than one calendar, perhaps as a duplicated event or a meeting that reaches you through several subscriptions, Finalist shows it once. A small ×2 marker notes how many copies it stands in for. Only calendars you have switched on count: a copy sitting on a calendar you turned off is neither the one that shows nor part of the tally. Two copies of an event on the same calendar are left alone, since duplicating an event there is something you did on purpose.

Event icons

Events wear a small icon matched from words in their title: "Dentist" gets a medical cross, "Flight to Lisbon" gets a plane. To teach Finalist your own words, open Settings → Calendar & Events → Custom event icons. Type a word or phrase in any language, pick an icon, and every event whose title contains that word shows it. Your words always win over the built-in ones, and they sync with iCloud to all your devices. The same screen lists every built-in trigger word, so you can see what's already covered. Prefer a fully custom set? Turn off Match built-in words there and only your own words will match.

New words are added to the bottom of your list. Tap the sort button above the list to order it alphabetically; tap again to flip between A→Z and Z→A. Order matters only when a title contains two of your words at once: the one higher in the list wins.

Your words travel well: Export copies them to the clipboard as JSON, and Import reads the same format back, adding new words without touching the ones you already have. It's a handy format to hand to an AI assistant, so you can ask for a starter set in your own language and paste the result straight in.

Planning ahead

To see your calendars past today, the Planner tab spreads them across a week, a month, or a whole year. You can add tasks straight onto a date, drag reminders between days to manage ongoing projects, and narrow the grid to just the Lists you're planning around.

Reminders

Reminders live in Apple's Reminders app and in Finalist at the same time. Add them where it's convenient, manage them anywhere, and they'll alert on all your devices, even ones without Finalist installed. You can also add whole Reminder lists to the Lists tab; see Lists.

Related: Timeline & Time Blocking · Lists · Sync & Devices