⚙️ iPhone and iPad Settings

Find Settings

Open InstaCal’s main menu and choose Settings. Each row opens a focused page, and changes apply immediately. Settings was redesigned in InstaCal 4.0 to match the Mac: most choices that change how something looks are picture cards that show each option before you pick it, a switch with a picker under it has become a single choice whose first card is Off, and rows carry the same names as on the Mac.

The list is grouped like this:

Search the field at the top of the list rather than hunting through the pages. It matches a setting’s name, any of its options, and the explanatory text underneath it — so “work days” finds the picker even though neither word is its title. Pick a result and InstaCal opens that page, scrolls the row into view and highlights it for a moment.

Touch and hold an event in the agenda and its menu ends with Agenda Settings…, which opens straight onto the page that styles it.

Calendars and accounts

Calendars controls visibility, default destination, order, local color overrides, reminder lists, import/export and availability tools. It also lists Hidden Events — single events you hid with Hide Event — each with Show to bring it back. Accounts manages system permission plus direct connections, and holds Sync All Accounts Now.

Calendar Order affects events that begin together, including all-day and multi-day bars in Month and widgets.

Events and notifications

Events chooses what + creates, the default calendar and alert, Apple Intelligence quick add, which invitations show, Travel Time with Leave Early By, Schedule Warnings and Conflict Blocking.

Notifications controls event and reminder delivery, fallback alerts for items with no saved alert, the all-day alert time, tasks, invitations, time-to-leave alerts, Schedule Risk Alerts and Quiet Hours. To avoid duplicate banners, decide whether InstaCal or Apple Calendar and Reminders should announce the same saved alert.

Its Alert Contents section decides what an alert says. Event Length adds how long the event runs, as an End Time or a Duration, and is Off to start with; Show Location decides whether the place appears, and is on. Both apply to banners and to the Alarms list, a location written over several lines is joined onto one line, and changing either one updates alerts already waiting to fire. Notification Detail decides how much of an event a notification may show at all.

Events → Schedule Warnings holds separate switches for event overlaps, short breaks, travel time and events outside working hours, plus the working hours themselves. Those settings feed both the warnings drawn on an event and Find a Time, and Check Conflicts On lists which calendars take part in conflict checking at all. Schedule Risk Alerts, under Notifications, is what turns one of those warnings into a notification before the event starts.

Widgets and the Live Countdown

Settings → Widgets & Live Activity holds the Live Countdown, which shows your next event on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island before it starts — see Live Activities and Controls. Countdown Style sets what the Live Countdown and the widgets show: Countdown, Start time, or Start time, then countdown, which switches at the time Switch to countdown sets, from 1 minute to 12 hours before. Touch and hold an event to change just that one. Featured Countdown chooses which countdown leads the Countdowns widgets set to Smart Upcoming.

Display, date and weather

Settings → Theme picks Light & Dark, the Calendar Background, the Accent Color — Blue, Red or Custom, which opens a color picker; Dark's color is made from yours automatically unless you pick your own — the Text Size, and the Home Screen icon: Original, Blue, Date, Blocks, Agenda, Month, Done, Simple Date, Outline or Mono. Your widgets and your Apple Watch follow the accent color too.

Settings → Agenda opens on a sample day and holds everything about the list you read most: the Mini Calendar, Rows (layout, Event Indicators, all-day events, past events and separators), the detail lines, Pictures, the Day Header, Happening Now, Behavior and Colors. Weather & Moon chooses provider, location, units, graphics and moon phases. Gestures & Navigation collects pinch behavior, year-day taps and Haptics. Date & Time controls week start, week numbers, the optional second time zone and the alternate calendar, described below.

Full Color and Pictures

Agenda → Rows → Event Indicators chooses how each timed event shows its calendar: Dots, Bars (where InstaCal starts), Timeline, Full Color — every event painted as a solid block of its calendar's color, like the all-day events above it — or None. Under Full Color, reminders and tasks are outlined in their list's color, and Mini Calendar Marks becomes a choice of its own, so the month grid keeps dots or bars.

Agenda → Pictures has two switches, both off until you turn them on. Place Photos puts a live street view of where an event is behind it — the storefront of a business, or the street at an address. Event Art adds a fitting picture for plans like Haircut or Halloween. Pictures Show In chooses Every Style or Full Color Only, and Pictures in Day View puts them on Day view's tiles too. Places are looked up in Apple Maps.

In an event's details, the picture's … menu changes a place's photo:

• Use This View keeps the angle you turned to while looking around the street as the place's photo everywhere.
• Change Photo… uses your own picture, framed the way you like.
• Reset to Default View goes back to the automatic street view.
• Don't Show Photo stops showing it for that event.

With Countdowns & Templates on under Settings → iCloud Sync, these choices follow you to your other iPhone, iPad and Mac.

New installs are asked how the day should look during setup — Classic, Full Color or Pictures — on a live agenda, and every part of that answer can be changed here later.

Calendar Views

Calendar Views shapes the calendar grids themselves. Open to chooses the view InstaCal opens in, and where tapping a widget takes you; Landscape Opens to chooses what turning the phone sideways shows — Currently Selected or any landscape view — and turning back returns to the view you left. On iPhone Duo it reads Outer Landscape Opens to.

Day & Week holds Days Shown — 2 to 7 days at a time, starting at 3 on iPhone and 7 on iPad — and Stack Overlapping Events. Month holds Grid Scrolling, Snap Scrolling, Month Shows, Month Opens At and Weeks Visible. Quarter holds the current month's position, Quarter Cells, the heat map and week numbers; Week on Week and Year have their own sections. 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.

Heat Map Colors, also in Calendar Views, switches the Quarter, Year and Up Next widget heat maps from Automatic to Custom, where you give each number of events its own color across 2 to 15 levels, and those colors sync with your Mac.

All-day events, Happening Now and the mini calendar

Agenda → Rows → 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.

Agenda → Happening Now holds the two controls that mark an event under way. Progress Bar chooses how the agenda row shows how far through it you are — Subtle fills a hairline along the foot of the row, Full Row makes the row itself the bar, and Off keeps the soft tint and the time left with no bar at all. Subtle is what you get if you never choose. With the bar on, Include All-Day and Multi-Day Events extends it to the bubbles across the top of the day, which stay plain otherwise; it starts off.

Up Next Bubble is in the same section, with three settings: Now & Next keeps the bubble naming the event you are in until it ends, Next Only moves on as soon as something starts, and Off hides it. The bubble is off until you turn it on, and it starts on Next Only when you do, because the agenda row already carries the event you are in. The plain on/off switch for the bubble in Button Layout still works and remembers which of the two you had picked here.

Agenda → Mini Calendar chooses the Mini Calendar Style and has switches for the month grid: Highlight Weekends, Highlight Current Week, Bold Numbers, which draws the day numbers in a heavier weight and is off unless you turn it on, and Start with Current Week. The highlights apply to the month grid; the week strip stays plain.

The Chinese lunar calendar

Settings → Date & Time → Alternate Calendar offers Off or Chinese Lunar. With it on, every day in Month, Quarter, the mini calendar, the Home Screen widgets and your Apple Watch's day pages carries its lunar date — 初五 — and Day view spells out the full date, such as 农历九月十九 · 丙午年【马】. Festivals and Solar Terms decide whether the traditional festivals and the 24 solar terms are marked; both are drawn in the accent color. The Mac has the same setting under Settings → General → Alternate Calendar.

Choose which app opens your links

Settings → Open Links, in the General group, 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.

An event carrying both a meeting room and a calendar web page — a Google event with a Meet link, usually — names the two apart: Copy Meeting Link and Copy Event Link. With only one it stays Copy Link, preferring the meeting. An event whose call is written into its location or notes rather than attached as a link gains a Copy Link it never used to have.

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 → Tasks, in the Lists group, 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.