CalReader Help

by Imaja

Introduction

CalReader is a productivity tool for reading event text from your iCal calendar on your iOS device (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad), including filtering the events by date range, calendars, and search text. CalReader's main events listing view displays ALL of the text of an event in an easy to read scrollable listing, making it easy to READ your events. Use pinch touch gestures to instantly resize the text for easy reading or higher density. Use the flexible Settings view to configure views and access other features. CalReader analyzes the event count and total hours for the event listing and calculates an invoice billing amount with total hours and rate per hour. Copy the event listing text, with or without the calculations, and then paste it into an e-mail or text editing app such as Notes. CalReader supports all device orientations, portrait and landscape.

CalReader supports display and editing web-based calendars, including MobileMe, Google, Yahoo!, or other CalDAV calendars. Use Mail, Contacts, Calendars in the Settings app to configure CalDAV accounts.

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Events Listing

The events listing is the main CalReader view, appearing when you start CalReader. It displays the events that match the Filter Settings, including Start and End date, a set of Calendars, and optional Search text.

Tap the Settings button to open the Settings view, change the Filter settings, choose Actions, Display, Calculations and Extras.

Swipe up and down to scroll the event listing.

Resize Text Shortcut: Use pinch touch gestures in the CalReader event listing view to instantly change the size of the text. Touch with two fingers and squeeze together to make the font size smaller, and spread your fingers to make the size larger.

Creating New Events

Tap the + button to add a new item to your calendar. The standard Add Event view appears where you can set all fields as desired. In particular, use the Calendar field to assign the event to the appropriate calendar to take advantage of the CalReader event filtering, calculations and color coding. Tap Done to confirm you want to save your new event, otherwise tap Cancel. New events will appear in your iCal calendar on your Mac OS X system once you sync your devices.

Tap Settings > Actions > Paste Text Into New Event to create a new calendar event with text you have copied from another app or location.

Editing Events

Tap an event to display event details. In the detail view, tap the Edit button to edit the details of the event. To delete an event, tap the Delete Event in the editing view to remove the event. Deleting events is permanent and will remove the event from your iCal calendar next time you sync your devices, or from your web-based calendar if you are online.

Note: Some events may not be editable if they belong to a read-only calendar. Read-only events will not have an Edit button.

CalDAV and Other Calendars

To add CalDAV calendars such as MobileMe, Google or Yahoo! calendars to your device, open the Settings app on your device and tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then tap Add Account..., and then tap Other, and then tap Add CalDAV Account. Enter the Server, User Name, Password and a Description for the CalDAV account. Get this information from your CalDAV account provider.

Creating events or modifying events in CalReader for CalDAV calendars such as Google or Yahoo! calendars do not automatically update web pages immediately. Web-based calendar pages might need be refreshed to (Google Calender:Refresh, or Yahoo Calendar:update) to see the new events.

New events can be created on your iOS device while offline, but to get those events to appear in web-based calendars such as Google Calendar or Yahoo Calendar, you will need to go online and open the event for editing and tap the Done button to send the event to your web-based calendar.

CalReader will play a short sound of jangling bells when the device calendar events have been updated from an external calendar such as MobileMe, Google, or Yahoo! CalDAV calendars.

The interval for CalDAV updates on the device are controlled in the Settings app under Mail, Contacts, Calendars in the Fetch New Data settings. The minimum interval is 15 minutes. Push is another option that allows the device to receive changes Pushed from the CalDAV server when they happen if the server supports Push.

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Settings

The Settings view includes Filter settings, and views for functions: Actions, Display, Calculations, and Extras.

Filter Settings

Use the Filter Settings to determine which events from your calendars are displayed. You can set the Start and End time, a subset of iCal Calendars, and set Search text. All of these together filter the listing to a subset of all events in your iCal calendar.

To change the set of calendars for viewing, tap Calendars in the Filter section. Use Select All Calendars or Deselect All Calendars at top as a shortcut to change the set of enabled calendars. Scroll down through the calendar listing and tap calendars as desired to enable or disable them for viewing.

Search the event listing filtered by the start and end date and calendars for text, keywords or phrases using the Search box. Tap the Search box and the typewriter keyboard appears. Enter the text to search for and tap the CalReader button at the top to see the event listing that matches the new Filter settings.

CalReader automatically remembers your Filter Settings between sessions so you return to the same views you last used.

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Actions

Go to Today - To jump to events closest to today.

Go to Date - Select a date and tap Go to Date again. CalReader scrolls to events on or after the date.

Copying Event Text

To export event listing text to an e-mail or other text editing apps, tap Copy Text or Copy Text With Calculations. Copy the calendar text for all filtered events, with or without calculations, to the pasteboard. This enables you to easily export the text to e-mails or other text editing apps such as Notes or Pages.

Paste Text Into New Event - To create a new event with text you have copied from another app or location, tap this command and the Event Details view appears. Tap Edit and set the time, calendar and other attributes for the event. Tap Done and return back to CalReader.

E-mail Text With Calculations - To send the current event listing with calculations via an e-mail, tap this command and the e-mailer view appears with your CalReader listing in the body of the message. Add recipients in the To, CC or BCC fields and tap Send to deliver your e-mail. If you don't want to send the e-mail, tap Cancel and you can choose either Delete Draft or Save Draft.

E-mail CSV (Comma-Separated) - To send the current event listing as a CSV file attached to an e-mail, tap this command and the e-mailer view appears with your CalReader listing as an attached file. Add recipients in the To, CC or BCC fields and tap Send to deliver your e-mail. If you don't want to send the e-mail, tap Cancel and you can choose either Delete Draft or Save Draft.

E-mail TSV (Tab-Separated) - To send the current event listing as a TSV file attached to an e-mail, tap this command and the e-mailer view appears with your CalReader listing as an attached file. Add recipients in the To, CC or BCC fields and tap Send to deliver your e-mail. If you don't want to send the e-mail, tap Cancel and you can choose either Delete Draft or Save Draft.

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Display Settings

Use the Display settings to customize the font and size of the calendar text for best readability: large text is easy on the eyes, or small text for high density information. Try selecting different fonts to find one that suits you.

Resize Text Shortcut: Use pinch touch gestures in the CalReader event listing view to instantly change the size of the text. Touch with two fingers and squeeze together to make the font size smaller, and spread your fingers to make the size larger.

Choose Lines All or 1-5 for the number of lines of each event to display. If you choose all, the size of each row is automatically configured to display all of the event text. If you choose a specific number of lines, each row will be adjusted to that height. If you are displaying a very large number of events based on your Filter Settings, then choosing All may be somewhat slower as it has to calculate the row height for each event. In this case, choose a fixed number of lines to speed up display of the event listing.

Choose from various Color Style options: event items can be tinted with the color of the calendar that each item belongs to. If you want to change the colors for calendars, you must do that within the iCal application on your Mac OS X computer, or on your web-based calendar such as Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar.

Note: For the best readability, colors are sometimes automatically adjusted by CalReader to increase contrast between the text color and the background color.

To use a table index for quick navigation through long listings of events (more than 100 events), turn the Indexed Table option on. The table index is displayed on the right side of the event listing and displays a series of abbreviated dates sampled from the current set of filtered events. Tap or drag through this table index to immediately move to that region of the listing.

To allow for more space for the event text, turn the Indexed Table option off.

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Calculations

The Calculations view displays several values about the current filtered event listing. CalReader automatically calculates the Event Count, Total Hours and Total Amount for the current subset of events as determined by the Filter Settings. The Total Amount is calculated by multiplying the Total Hours by your own Rate Per Hour setting. In addition, the average, minimum and maximum time per event is also calculated and displayed. The calculations will update everytime the Filter or Rate Per Hour is changed.

To change the Rate Per Hour, tap the Rate Per Hour box and enter the value with the keyboard. Tap outside of the keyboard to hide it and observe the updated Calculations.

Calculations can be copied to other Apps or e-mail on your iOS device. Use the Copy With Calculations command in the Actions view. Once copied, you can switch to another app such as Mail or Notes and tap in a text field to get the Paste popover menu. Tap paste and the event listing with calculations will be pasted into your e-mail or document.

Create calendars for clients or projects and use CalReader's Filter and Calculations settings to generate the desired time logs and billing amounts. Then use the Copy or E-mail commands in the Actions view to export the listing data to another application via paste, or to a person via e-mail.

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Extras

CalReader Help: This is CalReader's user guide to all of the features, including suggestions for usage of calendars and integrating with external programs such as web-based calendars, e-mail and text editing programs. The version of the CalReader app is also displayed here.

Web: http://imaja.com/calreader: Visit the CalReader web pages for details and support, and information on related products.

More from... imaja.com: Visit the Imaja web site to learn about other Imaja products: software for iOS, Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, DVD video, music, eBooks, artwork and more.

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Features

CalReader's Settings features are unique and make for easy browsing/reading of one's history or future plans. Calendars can be used to log a variety of details on work/home projects, and CalReader provides flexible tools for reading and working with the text, and analyzing the time and calculating an invoice billing amount for a given filter setup, total hours and rate per hour.

Calendars and Clients

Calendars can be used to track work done for specific clients or client projects. This allows CalReader to correctly calculate total hours and total amounts for those clients or projects. If you are using iCal calendars, create the appropriate calenders in iCal on your Mac OS X machine. You can also create calendars in Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar for viewing and editing in CalReader. The iOS system does not allow you create calendars.

Readability is Key

The filter settings of CalReader are quite useful and let you see complete listings of events that match a date range, calendar set, and a text phrase, AND you can easily read all of the text in the set of filtered set of events, including the event title, location, and notes, without extra taps and view changing.

The frustration of truncated text items ending with "..." is not an issue in CalReader; you can choose to see all of the event text for all displayed events in the list.

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Contact and Info


CalReader Web Pages


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We love feedback. Please e-mail us your comments and suggestions.

Version: CalReader 3.4.1.

CalReader is a trademark of Imaja.

Mac OS X, iCal, iOS, iPad, iPad mini, iPhone and iPod touch, Pages are trademarks of Apple Computer.

Copyright (c) 2010-2018 Imaja - Greg Jalbert.
All rights reserved.

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