Scheduler

Scheduler works like a calendar or ToDo list but with much more possibilities. To understand its inner workings you must know that it comprises of two lists: One that you are editing currently and one that is watched constantly in the background through a background process. If you press the 'Apply' button you will send the edited list to the background checker.

If an event is up you can chose which Mighty Action from the Actions tab will be executed. This makes Scheduler probably to the most versatile calendar system on the market.

Each entry of the list can be separately enabled or disabled, for example if a meeting is canceled for once.

Did you ever wish to have a scheduler without length limit for the displayed text? Did you ever wish you had only one single entry for all sorts of recurring events? Have you ever wanted the possibility to delete an event directly when it pops up? Have you ever wanted to see the entire list of completed and future events at a glance? Yeah, me too. Here you go. The text of an event can be multi-line and has no limits. The recurrence is smart enough to cope with all possible cases. And you can immediately see when an event will be up for the next time including all its follow-ups.

An event has a starting time (of day) and a ´Decay Time Span´. After the decay time the event will not be executed anymore and just be silent (but not deleted, that's something else). So it will not bother you anymore. You can also limit the number of times the event should pop up and you can let Mighty Desktop delete it automatically for you if that number is reached. A very common scenario is one that an event pops up only once and then is over.

The trigger of an event is extremely versatile. You could for example choose to just let it execute on the third Friday of the month. You can also just let it execute on some weekdays but on others not. Business events will usually be restricted to Monday..Friday which can be selected by a push on the wrench button. In combination with the decay time span you can configure an event to slip to the next allowed weekday automatically. Scheduler will never let you down: If your machine is not powered on at the scheduled time it will show the event right after you started Mighty Desktop.

The 'Date Patterns' field allows to specify multiple patterns for the day, month and year when it should be triggered. For example you could tell it to execute at day 12 of each month. Every part can use '*' as an "all match" character. If any of the patterns match the current date the event will be executed. This pattern system makes Scheduler extremely flexible. Examples:

• "Black Friday" is a day with a lot of shopping discounts. Just extend the options, click the eraser button, tick 'Friday' and '4.'. Then enter "*/11/*" as date pattern. This event is actually already predefined as an example.
  
  

You can also manage recurring events. For example if you want to have an event pop up all 90 days you could enter a full date in the 'Date Patterns' and '90 days' in the 'Recurrence' field. You can use any of the many natural language expressions that are recognized by DateTime Calculator. The advantage of recurring events is that they are aware of month lengths. The event in our example would still pop up after exactly 90 days even when the months between contain February with its 28 or 29 days. You wouldn't be able to achieve the same by just entering four dates "2/1/*, 5/1/*, 8/1/*, 11/1/*".

If you choose to show a Message box as the action to execute, you can configure it to some extent. You can for example specify its window title and content:

When the dialog box is shown you can do:

• Snooze the event (bring it up later again): Unlike many calendars I have used before you can enter really any thinkable timespan. The last used timespan will be the default for the next box appearance.
  
  
• You can alter the text. It will be changed in the edited list as well as in the background list. You will see the changed text the next time the event is brought up.
  
  
• You can jump directly to the originating event in the Scheduler tab
  
  
• You can delete the event from both lists if you don't need it anymore.
  
  

Preview

To get a Preview of all the upcoming events you can let Mighty Desktop bring up a window showing all events for one year.

If you scroll up you will also see the previously executed and snoozed events. Note that this preview can also be brought up by

• the popup menu of the icon in the Windows Tray
  
  
• a Mighty Command resp. Mighty Action
  
  
• command line
  
  
• pressing RightCtrl-E in any other app on your machine if the hotkeys are in their default configuration (see Hotkeys).
  
  

By double-clicking on an event in the preview you can jump directly to the event in the Scheduler tab.

Quick Event

Mighty Desktop's scheduler events can cover about any trigger criteria imaginable. But in the everyday scenario one often only needs to add a simple event for the next hours or days. For exactly this case there is a simplified dialog called ´Quick Events´:

Note that you can activate this dialog very quickly by pressing RightCtrl-Q from any other app on your machine. The full scheduler tab can be reached by RightCtrl-S. See tab Hotkeys.

A special copy & paste operation is supported: You can paste a list of Scheduler entries from a textual XML structured definition. This is the format that is used to store the events in the Settings file and you can produce it also by holding the [Shift] key while copying Scheduler events (resp. dropping them into a text editor).

Hints:

• The scheduler list as well as the preview of the future events can be quickly filtered to events containing a certain string
  
  
• If you are in another app you can add events using the popup of the icon in the Windows notification area. By default a quick event is added. Hold [Ctrl] to add a full event at the end in the Scheduler datagrid.
  
  
• If your input in the 'Time' field also specifies a date and there is already something in 'Date Pattern', the date will be appended to the list. This way you don't lose the existing date patterns.
  
  
• An event will only be brought up once inside the designated decay time span (which is 1 day by default). So if you move an event to a new time inside the decay time span which has just been brought up be sure to click the button [Reset Execution Info] or the event will not get activated.