Find Settings
Open InstaCal’s main menu and choose Settings. Each row opens a focused page, and changes apply immediately.
Calendars and accounts
Calendars controls visibility, default destination, order, local color overrides, reminder lists, import/export and availability tools. Accounts manages system permission plus direct Google and Microsoft connections.
Calendar Order affects events that begin together, including all-day and multi-day bars in Month and widgets.
Events and notifications
Events settings choose default duration, alert and calendar behavior.
Alerts controls event and reminder delivery, fallback alerts for items with no saved alert, all-day alert time, invitations, travel time and the next-event Live Activity. To avoid duplicate banners, decide whether InstaCal or Apple Calendar and Reminders should announce the same saved alert.
Alerts also holds Schedule Warnings — separate switches for event overlaps, short breaks, travel time and events outside working hours, plus the working days and hours themselves. Those settings feed both the warnings drawn on an event and Find a Time. Schedule Risk Alerts, in the same place, is what turns one of those warnings into a notification before the event starts, and Check Conflicts On lists which calendars take part in conflict checking at all.
Display, date and weather
The Display group holds Appearance, Button Layout and Gestures & Navigation. Appearance covers theme, text size, colors, agenda layout, indicators, day headers and density. Gestures & Navigation collects pinch behavior, year-day taps and Haptics. Date & Time controls week start, week numbers and the optional second time zone. Weather chooses provider, location, units, graphics and moon phases.
Appearance also shapes the calendar grids themselves. Month View holds Grid Scrolling (Scroll continuously or One month a page), Month Opens At (Current week or Entire month), Weeks Visible (2 to 6, starting at 6) and Days Shown (All days or Work days). Weekly View → Days Shown chooses 2 to 7 days at a time, starting at 3. Views and Navigation on iPhone shows what each one does.
On an iPad wide enough to hold the inspector, an Event Details section chooses between Side panel — the default, which keeps the selected event beside the calendar — and Popup, which opens details as a sheet instead. Gestures & Navigation → Tapping a Year Day decides what a tap in Year does, including Show list, which opens that day’s events as a half-height sheet.
Appearance → Agenda → All-Day Events chooses how loudly the bubbles across the top of a day are painted: Filled (a solid block of the calendar's color, and what you get if you never choose), Muted Colors (a soft tint of it) or Outlined (the edge only). The Up Next widget's all-day and countdown bars follow the same choice, and so does the Mac.
Appearance → Mini Calendar has three switches for the month grid: Highlight Weekends, Highlight Current Week and Bold Numbers, which draws the day numbers in a heavier weight and is on to start with in 3.8. All three apply to the month grid; the week strip stays plain.
Appearance also holds the Quarterly View, Yearly View and Details sections. The first two set where the current month sits in Quarter, the week numbers, the Wall Planner year and the two heat maps; Details chooses up to two extra lines under each title, separately for events, tasks, reminders and countdowns.
Choose which app opens your links
Settings → Open Links decides where a link goes when you tap it in InstaCal. Websites, Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams each get their own choice, and Maps gets one below them. The choices are saved on that device and are not synced to your Mac.
Only apps you actually have installed are listed, so the picker is short on a fresh iPhone and grows as you add Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, Zoom or Teams. The three meeting rows start on Use Website Browser, meaning meeting links follow whatever you picked for websites; System Default deliberately ignores that choice and hands the link to iOS, which is how you keep Safari when Safari is your system browser.
Google Meet is a little different: InstaCal opens its ordinary link and lets iOS route it to the Meet app if that app is installed, falling back to your website browser if not. iOS gives apps no way to ask that question in advance without opening the link, so Meet has no "installed" state to show you.
Maps offers System Default, Apple Maps or Google Maps, and both the map preview in an event and its directions follow it. Google Maps tries its own app first and its website in your chosen browser if the app is not there.
Open one link somewhere else, just this once
Long-press a link, a Join Call button or an address and InstaCal offers the other apps that can open it. Choosing one there opens the link in it without changing the saved preference — useful for the one call that has to go through a browser.
The same menu has Copy Link, which copies the original address exactly as the organizer wrote it, never rewritten into an app-specific form, and does not open anything.
Links in event notes follow these choices too, not just Join buttons.
Privacy
Settings → Privacy is its own group, with two rows.
App Lock puts Face ID or Touch ID in front of InstaCal, with a Lock after delay and your passcode as the fallback. While it is locked the app switcher shows a cover rather than your events.
Private Calendars hides chosen calendars and reminder lists from every view until you reveal them. The row shows how many are marked, or None. Both are described fully in Privacy and Data Handling.
Tasks
Settings → Calendars → Tasks opens InstaCal's own task settings: the lists, whether tasks appear on the calendar, the working hours free-time scheduling uses, and the task library's storage and notifications. Tasks covers the feature itself.
When a permission is missing
If InstaCal cannot see your reminders, the reminders list reads Reminders Access Needed instead of showing an empty list, with a Set Up… button that raises the system permission sheet, or Open iOS Settings… and a pointer to Settings → Apps → InstaCal → Reminders when access was refused earlier. The agenda says Calendar Access Needed the same way — including the case where InstaCal may add events but cannot read your calendar, where Allow Full Access asks in place.
Both grants are re-checked on every refresh, so a permission changed in the Settings app takes effect without relaunching InstaCal.
Ask for a feature
Settings → About → Request a Feature opens a form inside InstaCal — no mail client, no account. Choose a Type (New feature, Improvement, Bug report, Design or Something else), write a Summary of 3 to 120 characters, and add Details of up to 4,000 characters. Email and Screenshot are optional; the request is sent anonymously, and a screenshot chosen from your photo library is resized on the device before it is sent. Choose Send Request. One install can send ten a day. See Privacy and Data Handling.
Haptic feedback
InstaCal taps back as you work. Completing a reminder, saving or deleting an event, crossing a day as the agenda scrolls, crossing a month in the grid, the bar buttons and the switcher menu's rows each carry their own weight, and the compact switcher's press-and-hold jump taps hardest of all. A delete that fails does not feel like one that worked.
Choose the strength under Settings → Display → Gestures & Navigation → Haptics: Off, Subtle or Standard. Picking a level plays it, so you judge each option by feel. Off silences every haptic in the app.
Focus Filters
Under Settings → Calendar Sets, enable the sets allowed for Focus Filters. Then open the system Settings → Focus, choose a Focus, add an InstaCal filter and select the Calendar Set to activate. InstaCal restores the previous selection when the Focus ends.
