Here you see all the events of that day. You see the time and possibly the duration of the event as the first information. A "M" indicates that there is a Walnut message associated with this event. (this can be done with Remember's Remind button in the Walnut viewer). As a next item of information, the text associated with the event is displayed. Finally, you see the place where the event is happening. Note that both, text and place information might be truncated. Since it would be too slow to figure out the precise length of each text string, alignment is not really nice, sorry about that.

At the top of the day viewer, you see a set of buttons. Let's see what they do:

To select a singular event to be edited, forgotten etc, left click on it. To undo the selection left click again. Calendar expects you to first select an event and then the action to perform with it.

In this mode, you see all the events of that month. For each day of that month, you see the (truncated) text strings of the events of that day. Each individual day viewer is a scrollable text viewer, so you can see them all by scrolling up and down in the usual way.

At the top of the month viewer, you again see a set of buttons. The semantics of their actions should be obvious. In order to take a closer look at one particular day, you can middle click on the title of that day. This then will bring you back to the day browser, displaying the selected day.

Here you see all the events of that year. Note that building a year browser might take some time, so be patient! Days of that year where one or more events are happening have a grey background.

At the top of the year viewer, you again see a set of buttons. The semantics of their actions should be really obvious by now. In order to take a closer look at one particular month, you must middle click on the title of that month. This then will bring you back to the month browser, displaying the selected month. You cannot jump back directly to a day browser while in the year browser.

The menu of the calendar form has three entries. Here is what they do:

The template allows you to specify a calendar entry. Except the Text and Time field, all the fields are defaulted. At the top of the template you have a set of dates. Left clicking on a year, month or day updates the selected date. Note that if you change the year or month selection, the day grid is updated. Middle clicking on one of the buttons in the year, month or day table will bring you into browsing mode. Most of the other fields of the template are having a text viewer associated with them. To set the input focus you can use the mouse, clicking within the text viewer or left click on the button, which labels the field. This will select the current input (if any) in pending delete mode. The Group and Repetition field also allow for a menu selection. To select, middle click on the item of interest. To undo a selection, a second middle click erases the selected item. Since the Group menu might include more items than you can see at once, you can scroll it left or right. To scroll left, click the left mouse button and to scroll right, use your right mouse button.

Once you have selected the date on which you want to schedule your event, you must fill in the Text and Time fields. The Text field can take arbitrary text. The Time field allows you to schedule events starting on the selected date, stretching over any time period. The syntax of it is as follows:

startTime is interpreted by Tempus.Parse with respect to 0:00 of the selected date and endTime is interpreted with respect to startTime. Hence, if you have selected 8/31/1984 and startTime = noon and endTime = Sunday, you will eventually create a set of Hickory events that cover the period from 8/31/1984 — 9/2/1984 0:00. The interval between startTime and endTime will of course be the duration of the event.

There is one tricky thing to notice here. A single Hickory event cannot stretch out over more than one day. The reason is that it would be too cumbersome for Calendar to analyze and display such muliple day events correctly. Therefore, the form interpreter translates such long events into a set of one day events, which are then individually entered into Hickory. Beware, this might come up as a surprise when you want to edit the event: out of one Calendar event specification there are now several real Hickory events. The same is the case when more than one startTime — endTime is specified. If you give "noon — 14:30; 15:30 — 16:30" as time specification, two distinct events will be entered into Hickory and thus you cannot alter both by editing one of them. Something you have to bear in mind...!

The remaining fields of the template are optional. They all take on their default values, if you do not set their contents. Let's talk about each field in turn, what it means and how to use it.

Once you have filled out the form, left click the DoIt menu item. This will interpret the contents of the form and, if everything goes well, enter the event(s) into the database. Hickory then calls back Calendar in order to enable it too reflect the change in its different viewers. Calendar checks for nonsense on your form and signals that with a blinking message in the message window. Unfortunately the error reporting is kind of ad hoc and it also reports only one error at a time! But it should not be too hard to get things right, really!