What a commitment is

A commitment is one thing you have to do — an event, an appointment, a task, a birthday. On the sky — the whole app, one canvas that becomes each view — every commitment is a body in orbit round your year.

#The three kinds

A commitment's form says how it comes back. Its page says the form in words.

The meteor ☄ is the ordinary case. A new commitment is a meteor unless you say otherwise.

The asteroid ↻ can also read "every other week" or "every month". If it carries a longer rule you wrote yourself, its page shows the same opening and then that rule in words. A weekly one returns on named days of the week.

The fixed star ✦ suits a birthday, an anniversary or a holiday. While another calendar system is chosen, "every year" means that system's year.

When you talk to the assistant, the same three are "once", "repeats" and "yearly".

#Changing something that repeats

Anything but a meteor repeats. So when you change or remove one, the app asks whether you mean this one day or all of them.

Taking one day off does not break the pattern. The day is remembered as one the pattern skips.

A monthly commitment on the 29th, 30th or 31st, or a yearly one on 29 February, carries its own answer for a shorter month: skip it, use the month's last day, or roll into the next month. See Times & repeats.

#A moment shown as its day

A full moon, an eclipse or a planet changing sign is kept as its exact moment. It is drawn as an all-day entry on the day it falls on, and its page gives the exact time. It never rings — it marks the day, it is not an appointment. See Sky & astrology almanacs.

#What a commitment looks like in each view

• The year. The form itself is not drawn. Each almanac — a named, coloured layer of commitments — shows one body a day, and that body takes the look of its first commitment. A tail means something happens at a set time that day. Any timed commitment earns it, not only a meteor. A ring round the body means it comes back, yearly ones included. A repeating body is also drawn very slightly dimmer. In the open fan — the day's commitments spread toward the sun — each is a dot with its name, and its time if it has one.
• The day. Timed commitments tint their hours of the globe, and sit as dots on rings round it — or arcs, when they have a length. All-day ones are a row of marks above the earth. Neither shows the form; the brief does.
• The week. Each commitment is its mark and a start time. All-day ones come first, as "—".
• The month. Up to three marks a day. A bare dot appears only when there is nothing else to draw.
• The brief, in every view. The brief — the picked day's list along the bottom — draws the form as its glyph: ☄, ↻ or ✦.

A mark is the commitment's own picture, else its glyph, else its almanac's, else a first letter. Its colour is its own, else its almanac's. See What you fill in, material & place and What an almanac is.

#Weight

When you scrub — run a finger across the sky to read it — you feel each commitment through a small vibration. The more you have put into it, the heavier it feels: notes, a place, material, a section to fill in, links, a mark of its own. A day, a body or a door weighs what its heaviest commitment does. See Ease — motion, colour & touch.

#Dives and cuts

The dive is the app's word for the animated move between views. The camera flies at the body you touched. That body swallows the screen, and the next view opens out of it.

What dives:

• the year to the day, through an earth
• the year to the week, through a moon
• the day to the week, through the day's own moon
• the same routes back: the globe shrinks into the earth, the week into its moon

In the year, the earth and moon can be today's live pair or the ghost pair at whatever day is picked.

A dive takes a little under a second. It follows the bodies, not your finger, so the two meet at the same size and nothing jumps. Both views are on screen the whole time. The view you leave thins as it flies outward, and the new one fills in from the far end. The sun, the earth and the moon travel across on top, because they are the same objects in both views.

For the middle of the dive, the scenery clears. The ring, the orbit path, the month ticks, the hour dial, the night side and the commitment bodies fade out, then the new view's come back. In the middle, only the bodies are travelling.

While a dive runs, taps are ignored and back does nothing, so it never restarts halfway. Held sideways, the sky's frame moves between its two places during the dive.

A cut is every other change of view: the month to and from the week, the month to the day, the years, a "view in" jump, and a view the assistant or a shortcut names. The new view clears quickly through a veil, in about a third of a second.

Turning dives off. Turn "view transitions" off, or "reduce motion" on, and every change of view is a plain cut. "view transitions" starts on and "reduce motion" starts off. Both are in settings › "ease".

#See also.

Add a commitment · Times & repeats · Moving between the views · Ease — motion, colour & touch