Budget time honestly. Edit quickly. Mind-dump at light speed. Build flexible routines easily. Schedule your day accurately even when crossing five time zones. See weather forecasts on your own calendar. Layer and toggle outside information. And keep access forever.
You don’t have to click in the command bar. Just start typing from any view. Mind dump without touching the mouse.
Type a task name and a duration. You can add duration inline (Read 60, Gym 1h) or type a name (Clean) followed by Enter and then type the duration (20, for 20 minutes).
Not everything has a time yet. Whatever you capture without one waits in the river beside the calendar, where it can be dragged onto a day, poured into a gap with /fill, or sent back with /river to keep everything but its slot. Not this week? /snooze it until a day and it surfaces again on its own.
Need to turn your mattress twice a year or call someone every two weeks but don’t want to pretend you know exactly when you’ll do it? Just make a recurring event (via /recur) appear “in the river” and have it pop up in your scheduleable tasks at any frequency you want. Six months from now you can put your 20 min “turn mattress” block wherever it works for that week.
Shape an ideal week, quickly
Stop using dumb repeating calendar events for time-blocking. Alphonsus lets you block with centrally-controlled blocks that are globally editable. Your fixed events like work or classes can be created with a few strokes of the keyboard, with fast and flexible text-based patterns (two days before every US federal holiday? You got it). Then you can create flexible blocks (things like Reading or Side Project or Prayer or Ukulele Practice or anything) manually, or automatically based on amount per day, week, or month, or total hours before an end date. Type :recur to enter the recurring event editor. Your one-off blocks disappear and you see only your routines. Change one Sunday and it applies to all Sundays, one Thursday to change all Thursdays (of course you add a date break to specify different patterns at different times). Save, or discard at the end to send everything back to how it was before you started.
You can also just select a block on your calendar and type /recur to create a new recurring event.
Multi-day ranges (/range) can recur with the same flexible and powerful options as a normal event.
Type /recur on a block in the river to make it appear there, unscheduled, on an interval you choose.
A /group can recur, too. Make a Morning Routine /group and make it repeat automatically after sleep. To update your routine, just change in one place, and it propagates everywhere.
Anything you want to be aware of but aren’t actually doing can go on a /layer. Friends’ flights? On a layer (pick up or drop-off can automatically show through to your own schedule). Random pool open hours? On a layer. Friend’s class or work schedule? Layer. All farmers’ markets throughout the week? Layer. Type // and layer name to pull it up, and hit shift+enter to merely toggle visibility. Your most-used can be a tab on the layer rail. Layers are always aligned to your own calendar, so you see things as they happen at your own time, regardless of where the other thing is.
Enter /sandbox and then make any changes you want to your calendar, and either save a draft or throw it away. Or commit it, of course! Want to see if you can make space for something? Try. If it doesn’t work, you don’t have to remember how to put everything back the way it was.
A calendar for how you, and your neighbors, live
Easily send events not only to dates but to moveable feasts, too. “Easter”, “Pentecost Monday”, “Eid Al Adha”, “First day of Ramadan”, “Sukkot”; it’s all tracked and parsed. Go to :holiday to enable a large (and growing) library of holidays and feast days to insert into the day headers, or into the range ribbon above. Enable as many as you need.
Religious Easter eggs abound. Catholic holiday calendars show liturgical color and fast and abstinence in the header. Use /novena to block your nine days of prayer from a searchable saint library. /salah shows Islamic prayer times for whenever your calendar says you’ll be that day (tons of calculation options in :salah). /shabbat shades over work-free periods, also matched to location. Jewish holidays correctly change days if you’re in Israel. Islamic ones update over a moon sighting API once the Saudis confirm them.
On by default, the /daylight background shows location-specific sunrise and sunset periods so you know whether you’ll be commuting in the dark, for example. It’s even more or less accurate for a flight!
Even better than a generic /warp is a specific /flight! Enter /flight and type a flight number and date, or add origin and destination to search.
How much time will getting there take? Don’t fudge it, just type /car or /walk or /transit and add your endpoints (or select an already-located event to fill one automatically) to get a correctly-sized block. /car blocks resize automatically to account for traffic (longer during rush hour). /transit lets you choose an itinerary. Selecting several events with locations and executing a travel command links all of them automatically with that mode.
Know what you’re scheduling yourself into. /weather shows highs and lows in the header as well as expected precipitation during your day. /temp lets you see the ups and downs in detail for up to ten days out.
Keep your docs where and when you need them
Upload files attached directly to your calendar block. Put your train ticket on your Train block; put your readings on your Reading block. Regular Alphonsus customers will be able to do this locally on the desktop app; Magnus subscribers can save to the cloud so it appears on all their devices (regular customers get free syncing of data too, just not for files).
Every location field in Alphonsus takes a place, and a place is more than a name: it has a timezone and a pair of coordinates, and daylight, weather, travel time and the clock in the column all read from them. Without MAGNUS you type the name and the built-in table of airports and cities supplies the zone. With MAGNUS every field asks Google Places instead — any address, any café, any trailhead on earth — so the block knows exactly where it is, and /car, /walk and /transit have real endpoints to route between.
Suggest your own with the /suggest command in your account!
Alphonsus’ sole (human) developer is me, Nathaniel Arnold, an Urban Planning grad student in Sharjah, UAE. Obviously a lot of AI goes into building and running this, as well. There is no venture capital or really any other kind of capital, so smash that BUY button to keep development (and my meals) rolling!
Alphonsus is named for the 18th century Catholic priest St. Alphonsus de Liguori who, it is said, took a vow to never waste one minute of time, and clearly took that seriously, as he somehow managed to write over 100 works in the spare time of his busy, busy days as a missionary priest and bishop.
Email me at nathaniel@nxthaniel.com
More coming soon!
Every command starts with one of two keys:
For example, /flight looks up a flight and adds it, and :flight opens a list of flights you have taken or booked.
Here are the rest:
| / makes or acts | : opens |
|---|---|
| /flight looks up a flight and adds it | :flight every flight: past, present and to come |
| /vacation hides events for a stretch, or plans a trip | :vacation all your vacations |
| /share shares when you are free, for a window you pick | :share what a friend sees: your calendar with the names taken off |
| /sleep adds a sleep block | :sleep see and edit your sleep schedule |
| /recur creates a repeating event, or makes the selection repeat | :recur shows everything that repeats, at its scheduled time, for global editing |
| /novena starts a novena; search by saint | :novena all your novenas, and which day of nine each is on |
| /bday adds a birthday | :bday every birthday |
| /dead adds a deadline, to the selection or on its own | :dead every deadline, soonest first, with a tick for done |
| /group makes a new block group, or makes a group of the selection | :group your library of groups |
| /draft saves the sandbox as a named draft | :draft your drafts |
| /undo undoes the last thing (so does Command+Z) | :undo every step by name; click one to undo back to it |
| /tz shows or hides another timezone beside yours | :tz where you add your saved timezones |
| /daylight paints the sun behind the grid | :daylight settings for the sun |
| /salah shows or hides the five prayer times | :salah prayer time settings |
| /bug reports something broken | :bug your bug reports and where each one stands |
| /suggest suggests an idea or a missing feature | :suggest your suggestions |
And as a bonus:
Type a task name and a duration. You can add duration inline (Read 60, Gym 1h) or type a name (Clean) followed by Enter and then type the duration (20, for 20 minutes).
Select and type /delete+Enter to delete. It deletes immediately (Command+Z undoes). The bare delete key doesn’t do much. Stops accidents, this way.
Blocks generally stay out of the way of others automatically (you mostly can’t do two things at once, after all). But:
Important Use /lock to lock a block in place. Important for anything scheduled, as otherwise, dragging blocks around that block can push it around to make room.
Budget time honestly. Edit quickly. Mind-dump at light speed. Build flexible routines easily. Schedule your day accurately even when crossing five time zones. See weather forecasts on your own calendar. Layer and toggle outside information. And keep access forever.
You don’t have to click in the command bar. Just start typing from any view. Mind dump without touching the mouse.
Type a task name and a duration. You can add duration inline (Read 60, Gym 1h) or type a name (Clean) followed by Enter and then type the duration (20, for 20 minutes).
Start typing now to try the command line
Not everything has a time yet. Whatever you capture without one waits in the river beside the calendar, where it can be dragged onto a day, poured into a gap with /fill, or sent back with /river to keep everything but its slot. Not this week? /snooze it until a day and it surfaces again on its own.
Need to turn your mattress twice a year or call someone every two weeks but don’t want to pretend you know exactly when you’ll do it? Just make a recurring event (via /recur) appear “in the river” and have it pop up in your scheduleable tasks at any frequency you want. Six months from now you can put your 20 min “turn mattress” block wherever it works for that week.
Shape an ideal week, quickly
Stop using dumb repeating calendar events for time-blocking. Alphonsus lets you block with centrally-controlled blocks that are globally editable. Your fixed events like work or classes can be created with a few strokes of the keyboard, with fast and flexible text-based patterns (two days before every US federal holiday? You got it). Then you can create flexible blocks (things like Reading or Side Project or Prayer or Ukulele Practice or anything) manually, or automatically based on amount per day, week, or month, or total hours before an end date. Type :recur to enter the recurring event editor. Your one-off blocks disappear and you see only your routines. Change one Sunday and it applies to all Sundays, one Thursday to change all Thursdays (of course you add a date break to specify different patterns at different times). Save, or discard at the end to send everything back to how it was before you started.
You can also just select a block on your calendar and type /recur to create a new recurring event.
Multi-day ranges (/range) can recur with the same flexible and powerful options as a normal event.
Type /recur on a block in the river to make it appear there, unscheduled, on an interval you choose.
A /group can recur, too. Make a Morning Routine /group and make it repeat automatically after sleep. To update your routine, just change in one place, and it propagates everywhere.
Anything you want to be aware of but aren’t actually doing can go on a /layer. Friends’ flights? On a layer (pick up or drop-off can automatically show through to your own schedule). Random pool open hours? On a layer. Friend’s class or work schedule? Layer. All farmers’ markets throughout the week? Layer. Type // and layer name to pull it up, and hit shift+enter to merely toggle visibility. Your most-used can be a tab on the layer rail. Layers are always aligned to your own calendar, so you see things as they happen at your own time, regardless of where the other thing is.
Enter /sandbox and then make any changes you want to your calendar, and either save a draft or throw it away. Or commit it, of course! Want to see if you can make space for something? Try. If it doesn’t work, you don’t have to remember how to put everything back the way it was.
A calendar for how you, and your neighbors, live
Easily send events not only to dates but to moveable feasts, too. “Easter”, “Pentecost Monday”, “Eid Al Adha”, “First day of Ramadan”, “Sukkot”; it’s all tracked and parsed. Go to :holiday to enable a large (and growing) library of holidays and feast days to insert into the day headers, or into the range ribbon above. Enable as many as you need.
Religious Easter eggs abound. Catholic holiday calendars show liturgical color and fast and abstinence in the header. Use /novena to block your nine days of prayer from a searchable saint library. /salah shows Islamic prayer times for whenever your calendar says you’ll be that day (tons of calculation options in :salah). /shabbat shades over work-free periods, also matched to location. Jewish holidays correctly change days if you’re in Israel. Islamic ones update over a moon sighting API once the Saudis confirm them.
On by default, the /daylight background shows location-specific sunrise and sunset periods so you know whether you’ll be commuting in the dark, for example. It’s even more or less accurate for a flight!
Even better than a generic /warp is a specific /flight! Enter /flight and type a flight number and date, or add origin and destination to search.
How much time will getting there take? Don’t fudge it, just type /car or /walk or /transit and add your endpoints (or select an already-located event to fill one automatically) to get a correctly-sized block. /car blocks resize automatically to account for traffic (longer during rush hour). /transit lets you choose an itinerary. Selecting several events with locations and executing a travel command links all of them automatically with that mode.
Know what you’re scheduling yourself into. /weather shows highs and lows in the header as well as expected precipitation during your day. /temp lets you see the ups and downs in detail for up to ten days out.
Keep your docs where and when you need them
Upload files attached directly to your calendar block. Put your train ticket on your Train block; put your readings on your Reading block. Regular Alphonsus customers will be able to do this locally on the desktop app; Magnus subscribers can save to the cloud so it appears on all their devices (regular customers get free syncing of data too, just not for files).
Every location field in Alphonsus takes a place, and a place is more than a name: it has a timezone and a pair of coordinates, and daylight, weather, travel time and the clock in the column all read from them. Without MAGNUS you type the name and the built-in table of airports and cities supplies the zone. With MAGNUS every field asks Google Places instead — any address, any café, any trailhead on earth — so the block knows exactly where it is, and /car, /walk and /transit have real endpoints to route between.
Suggest your own with the /suggest command in your account!
Alphonsus’ sole (human) developer is me, Nathaniel Arnold, an Urban Planning grad student in Sharjah, UAE. Obviously a lot of AI goes into building and running this, as well. There is no venture capital or really any other kind of capital, so smash that BUY button to keep development (and my meals) rolling!
Alphonsus is named for the 18th century Catholic priest St. Alphonsus de Liguori who, it is said, took a vow to never waste one minute of time, and clearly took that seriously, as he somehow managed to write over 100 works in the spare time of his busy, busy days as a missionary priest and bishop.
Email me at nathaniel@nxthaniel.com
Every command starts with one of two keys:
For example, /flight looks up a flight and adds it, and :flight opens a list of flights you have taken or booked.
Here are the rest:
| / makes or acts | : opens |
|---|---|
| /flight looks up a flight and adds it | :flight every flight: past, present and to come |
| /vacation hides events for a stretch, or plans a trip | :vacation all your vacations |
| /share shares when you are free, for a window you pick | :share what a friend sees: your calendar with the names taken off |
| /sleep adds a sleep block | :sleep see and edit your sleep schedule |
| /recur creates a repeating event, or makes the selection repeat | :recur shows everything that repeats, at its scheduled time, for global editing |
| /novena starts a novena; search by saint | :novena all your novenas, and which day of nine each is on |
| /bday adds a birthday | :bday every birthday |
| /dead adds a deadline, to the selection or on its own | :dead every deadline, soonest first, with a tick for done |
| /group makes a new block group, or makes a group of the selection | :group your library of groups |
| /draft saves the sandbox as a named draft | :draft your drafts |
| /undo undoes the last thing (so does Command+Z) | :undo every step by name; click one to undo back to it |
| /tz shows or hides another timezone beside yours | :tz where you add your saved timezones |
| /daylight paints the sun behind the grid | :daylight settings for the sun |
| /salah shows or hides the five prayer times | :salah prayer time settings |
| /bug reports something broken | :bug your bug reports and where each one stands |
| /suggest suggests an idea or a missing feature | :suggest your suggestions |
And as a bonus:
Type a task name and a duration. You can add duration inline (Read 60, Gym 1h) or type a name (Clean) followed by Enter and then type the duration (20, for 20 minutes).
Select and type /delete+Enter to delete. It deletes immediately (Command+Z undoes). The bare delete key doesn’t do much. Stops accidents, this way.
Blocks generally stay out of the way of others automatically (you mostly can’t do two things at once, after all). But:
Important Use /lock to lock a block in place. Important for anything scheduled, as otherwise, dragging blocks around that block can push it around to make room.