Your calendar, inside Pikos

Pikos 0.4.0 connects to your real calendar. Google Calendar, iCloud, or any server that speaks CalDAV. Your events show up in the Pikos calendar as actual pages you can write notes on, tag, and mark done.

This closes the biggest gap in the app. Pikos puts notes, tasks, and calendar in one place, but until now the calendar only knew about things you created in Pikos. Your actual schedule lived somewhere else. Now it's on the same screen as the work it relates to.

Read-only, on purpose

Sync is one-way: your calendar comes in, nothing goes out. That's the design, not a gap waiting to be filled. The title, time, and repeat rule of a synced event are locked in Pikos, so what you see always matches what's on your calendar. Everything you add on top is yours. Notes, tags, reminders, completions. They live on your device and never sync back.

Two-way sync sounds better until you think about what a bug in it does: it rewrites your meetings. Read-only gives you most of the value, meeting notes next to the meeting, with none of that risk.

Two ways to connect

Google Calendar uses Google sign-in. Click Add account, choose Google, and approve read-only access in your browser. Pikos asks for read-only access to your calendars and events.

CalDAV covers iCloud and most providers that aren't Google. You enter a server URL, your username, and an app-specific password, and Pikos discovers your calendars from there. The setup guide walks through it, including where to get an app password.

Either way, your credentials go straight into the system keychain, never the Pikos database. Disconnecting deletes them, and for Google it also asks Google to revoke the grant. If that call can't go through, Pikos has still lost its own copy, and you can clear the grant from Google's permissions page.

The details

• Recurring events come across properly: repeats, exceptions, moved occurrences, and cancelled ones.
• Reminders you set in Pikos fire at the right moment, even for an event in another time zone. Your provider's own alerts don't come across, because a read-only mirror would leave you with a reminder you couldn't edit.
• Everything works offline. Events are stored locally, and Pikos re-checks every few minutes and whenever you focus the window.
• The past week comes in, along with everything ahead of it. Older events stay where they are.
• Each calendar gets its own folder and color, and you choose exactly which calendars sync.
• Turning a calendar off removes its events but keeps every page you wrote notes on. The folder stays too, as an ordinary one, if any of your pages are still in it.

What this means for privacy

Sync talks to your calendar provider and to nothing else. There's no Pikos server in the middle; there's no Pikos server at all. The app's one other request is the update check it makes at launch, which you can turn off in Settings. Sync itself is off by default and nothing connects until you set it up. The privacy policy has the full picture.

Download Pikos, open Settings, and find the Calendar Sync tab. Setup takes about two minutes.