Can I assign a custom alert time to a calendar entry?

Question

I want to have an alert 90 minutes before a calendar event. That isn't an option in Calendar on iOS. Fantistical has more alert time options than Calendar so I imagine there's a way to set an arbitrary alert time. Is there a way to do that from the command line or a script?

Answer 1

If you go into the Calendar app you can setup a custom alert per entry. Here I've added an item to my Calendar and then double clicked on it to open up a dialog to customize. Under that menu is an alert section under the time/date area of the calendar entry, in that menu select customize.

Calendar entry dialog

Alert menu

Customize menu

You can setup either an email or an audible sound for your specific time

CLI access to Calendar

You could use icalBuddy which was recommended in this other AD Q&A titled: Displaying calendar events as text, in the terminal.

References

• Set event alerts and receive notifications in Calendar on Mac

Answer 2

There is an ugly workaround on iOS:

1. make sure you have a Google account;
2. install Google Calendar for iOS;
3. add your event in Google Calendar, which does allow you to set a custom alarm time;
4. add the Google account to iOS settings and make sure to include calendar data;
5. optionally, once you have your Google calendar also showing up in the iOS built-in calendar, you can use the iOS build-in calendar to move the event from Google into the iOS calendar, which will keep the custom alarm time.