Walkthroughs

Meet the dial

Your whole year lives on one rotating face. Instead of paging through weeks, you spin through time.

1. Open Cronicular — you land straight on the dial, showing the current year as a ring of months.
2. Drag the dial round to move forward or back through the year.
3. Pinch with two fingers to zoom in and out, or drag the zoom slider down the right-hand side of the screen.
4. Tap a date on the face to spin the dial to that day; the top drawer slides down with whatever's on it.
5. Whenever you've moved off today or zoomed in, the little date button and the reset-zoom button appear — tap them to jump back to today and the full year.

Add an event

Events are the things that happen on a day — meetings, plans, reminders. You add them from the button at the bottom of the dial.

1. Tap the + button near the bottom of the screen — it opens out into Add Event, Add Anchor and Add Ring.
2. Tap Add Event.
3. Give it a title and set the date. Leave it as an all-day event, or turn off All Day to set a start and end time.
4. Choose which calendar it belongs to — for example Work or Home — and add notes, a location, an icon or a reminder if you like.
5. Need it more than once? Set it to repeat (weekly, monthly, yearly and more), or make it an ongoing event that runs until you end it.
6. You can also link an event to an anchor — a dashed connector draws between them on the dial, tying the plan to the moment it leads up to.
7. Tap Save. The event now sits on the dial, colour-matched to its calendar.

Anchors — the fixed points

Anchors are the moments that don't move: birthdays, deadlines, trips, anniversaries. They sit on the dial as markers you can always see coming.

1. Tap the + button at the bottom of the dial, then tap Add Anchor.
2. Give it a name and a date, and pick a colour and an icon.
3. You can add a photo to make it an image anchor, or set a reminder so it nudges you in advance.
4. Tap Save — it pins to the dial at that point in the year.

Already saved anchors live in the bottom drawer under Anchors, where you can show, hide, recolour or edit them.

Also worth knowing

• They can repeat. Set an anchor to recur and it returns every year — birthdays and anniversaries only need entering once.
• Import birthdays. Pull birthdays straight from your Contacts and they arrive as anchors, collected under a single Birthday Anchors row so they never crowd the list.
• Photo anchors. Add a picture and the marker becomes that photo on the dial — a holiday or a wedding you can actually see coming.
• Two visibility controls. Show in View hides an anchor everywhere at once, and on the dial Confine to Ring lines every anchor up at a single radius instead of letting them fan outward.

Linked anchors — journeys on the dial

Two anchors that belong together can be joined, and the dial draws a line between them. A flight out and a flight home. Treatment starting and treatment ending. The day you moved in and the day the work finished. It turns two separate dots into one stretch of time you can watch approach.

1. Open an anchor and choose to link it to another anchor.
2. Pick the connector style: Chevrons, Plane, Truck or Footprints.
3. Save. The two anchors are now joined by a trail running between their dates.

What the trail does

• It travels. A small icon rides the connector and sits at today's position along it — before the run it waits at the start, during it the icon is somewhere in the middle, and once it's done the icon has arrived. You can see at a glance how far through a trip or a project you are.
• Chains work. Link A to B and B to C and the whole run travels together on its own level, so a multi-leg trip reads as one journey rather than three unrelated markers.
• Anchors link to events too. Join an anchor to an event and the same connector runs between them — handy for "the deposit is due, then the holiday happens".
• Every view shows them. On the dial the trail is an arc; in Minimal it runs down the left-hand gutter; in Classic it takes its own row. Same links, three ways of reading them.

Living rings

Rings let you layer your life around the dial. Cronicular has two kinds: calendars — your own colour-coded rings of events and anchors (Work, Home, Fitness, a shared calendar) — and style rings — living layers like the zodiac, the seasons, planetary positions, or your Apple Health data.

1. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to open the bottom drawer.
2. Under Calendars, add a new calendar, name it and pick a colour; assign events and anchors to it as you create them.
3. Under Style Rings, switch on the built-in layers, or tap + to build a custom ring — including one driven by your Apple Health data. Each one is explained in the next section.
4. You can also reach the custom-ring builder straight from the dial: tap the + button and choose Add Ring.
5. Toggle any ring on or off to focus on just what you need right now.

Style rings explained

Style rings are the layers that aren't your appointments — the natural and astronomical rhythms your year sits inside. Switch on as many or as few as you like; each one takes a band on the dial.

Built in

• Zodiac — two ways of reading the same twelve signs. Calendar lays them around the year by the dates they cover. Night sky draws them where they really are in space, so the Solar System ring's beam falls on the constellations you can actually see — and yes, the chart sits opposite the calendar: the sign the Sun is "in" is behind the Sun and invisible, which is why you see winter constellations on summer mornings. You can recolour every sign to suit your theme.
• Ephemeris — planetary retrogrades. Every planet gets its own lane, and a thick arc marks each stretch where it runs retrograde. Chiron is included alongside the classical planets. Tap a planet to see its retrograde dates; a planet that isn't retrograde right now waits at the start of its next one.
• Solar System — a top-down map of the solar system, drawn for the day you're looking at. The Sun is the centre of the dial (a small sun marks it), Earth sits on the midnight line, and every planet is placed at its real position relative to us. A soft beam sweeps around Earth the way your horizon actually turns through the night — from the evening sky at dusk, straight out at midnight, to the morning sky at dawn — so you can watch which planets come into view as the night passes. Faded planets are lost in the Sun's glare; the amber cone shows why. The Moon rides around Earth half-lit, its bright side always facing the Sun — so its phase is simply the geometry you're looking at. And on the day of a real solar or lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon line up on the dial with the alignment drawn in — every eclipse from 1900 to 2100 is in there.
• Eclipses — a thin ring of dots, one for every solar (yellow) and lunar (dark) eclipse of the year, so you can see at a glance which days to look up. When the Solar System ring is on, it sits just outside it. Every eclipse from 1900 to 2100 is in the app; the faint penumbral lunars are left out because you would not see them anyway.
• Solstice — the solstices and equinoxes marked precisely, with your local daylight hours through the year if you allow location.
• Seasonal — a season colour wheel with seasonal motifs, drawn to fit whatever thickness the band has; on a busy dial it simplifies itself rather than turning to mush.

Build your own

• Tracker — your own date spans on their own ring. A project, a course, a season of five-a-side.
• Data point — a chart drawn round the year from Apple Health (steps, sleep, workouts) or numbers you enter yourself.
• Life event — the chapters of your life as arcs: jobs, homes, relationships, the long stretches a normal calendar has nowhere to put.
• Image — your own photo wrapped round the dial.
• Month colours — a simple twelve-colour band, the quickest way to make the year yours.
• Release schedule — a ring of upcoming release dates.

Build any of these from the bottom drawer — tap + on Style Rings — or from the + button on the dial and Add Ring.

Plans — for things without a date yet

Not everything has a date. "Redecorate the spare room, sometime this spring." A plan sits on the dial as a soft band across the window you're thinking of, instead of forcing you to invent a day you'll only end up moving.

1. Open the bottom drawer and find Plans.
2. Add a plan and choose its window — pick a season, a month, a few months, or set a custom range.
3. It appears on the dial as a soft band, deliberately vaguer-looking than a real event.
4. When it firms up, complete the plan: choose the day it's actually happening and which calendar it belongs to, and the soft band becomes a proper dated event.

Groups — one-tap views of your dial

A group is a saved preset of calendars, style rings and anchors. Set up a view you love — say, just your Work calendars with the Ephemeris ring — save it once, and switch back to it in a single tap.

1. Turn on exactly the calendars, style rings and anchors you want in the view.
2. Open the bottom drawer — Groups sits at the top of the Calendars drawer. Tap its + to save the current setup as a group.
3. Give it a name. Each group lists what it holds — its calendars, rings and anchors.
4. Tap a group to apply it in one tap; tap it again to switch back to your full dial.
5. Groups also power the Groups and Group Dial home-screen widgets, so you can jump straight into a view from your home screen.

Apple Health on the dial

Bring sleep, workouts, and activity straight onto the face of your year, to see how the rhythm of your body lines up with your plans. Your Health data stays on your device — it's never sent to our servers.

1. Open Settings inside Cronicular and go to Account & Data → Integrations.
2. Tap Connect next to Apple Health.
3. When iOS asks, allow access to the data you want to show.
4. Then add a health style ring: open the bottom drawer, tap + on Style Rings, choose a data ring and pick the Apple Health metric (steps, sleep, and so on).
5. Your activity now appears as a living layer on the dial.

Discover — find release dates and add them

Describe what you're after in plain language and Cronicular finds the real release dates and puts them on your dial — no typing dates in by hand, and no guessing, because the dates come from a real film database rather than being invented.

1. Open Search and switch to the Discover tab.
2. Ask for what you want — for example "films directed by Denis Villeneuve".
3. Pick a result and add it. It lands as an event covering the release window, on the calendar you choose.
4. Later, drop an anchor for the day you actually watched it, and the dial draws a dashed connector from the release across to your anchor.

Widgets & Apple Watch

Your year doesn't have to stay inside the app. Cronicular ships nine widgets — for the home screen, the lock screen and StandBy — plus a full Apple Watch app.

1. Touch and hold your home screen or lock screen, tap + (Add Widget) and search for Cronicular.
2. On the home screen: Year Dial — your whole year with today's position, event arcs and anchor dates (also works in StandBy); Upcoming — what's next across events and anchors; Insights — your headline stats; Group Dial — a mini dial of one group's calendars; Groups — tap to apply a saved group without opening the app; and Today.
3. On the lock screen: Anchor Countdown — days until the anchor you care about; Year Progress — how far through the year you are; and Dial Lock — a mini dial, or today plus what's next.
4. On Apple Watch, the Cronicular app puts an interactive dial on your wrist — turn the Digital Crown (or drag the face) to spin through the year, and use the arrows to hop between your events.
5. Tap the Watch dial to snap back to today.

Insights

Analytics for your year — see how your time actually breaks down across your calendars, events and anchors.

1. Tap the Insights tab in the bottom bar.
2. Switch the scope between Current Year and All Time, and use the filters to focus on particular calendars.
3. Open the nine report sections — Year, Life in Weeks, Overview, Rhythm, Calendars, Upcoming, Anchors, Trends and Custom Trackers — to explore the patterns in your dial. Every count-per-bucket report is drawn in the same bar language with the peak picked out, and a one-line takeaway under it.
4. Custom Trackers (Pro) are your own questions counted across events — "beds slept in", "money spent", "did I train" — set up under Calendars → Custom Trackers, answered inline from the event editor, and totalled here.

Themes

Recolour the whole dial to match your mood or the season.

1. Open Settings and go to Appearance.
2. Pick one of the six built-in themes — Primary, Solarized, Pastel, Cream, Tokyo Night and Neon — or design your own with the theme creator.
3. The dial restyles instantly. Unlocking the full app gives you every theme.

The three views

Same dial, same data, three ways of reading it. Switch between them in Settings → Appearance.

1. Dial — the full rotating face. With it selected you can also choose a Year, Month or Week scope, so the same dial can show your whole year or just this week.
2. Minimal — a clean vertical list of your days, with anchors and their linked trails running down a gutter on the left. Pinch or use the + and − buttons to step through five zoom levels, from eight small cards across to two big ones; the day you are on sits in a square box, and when it has more events than fit, the extras spill into a pocket beside it. Multi-day and ongoing events show once in full on the day they start and as a slim strip after that.
3. Classic — a familiar week grid, with your anchors and their connectors along the top. Everything you've built still shows up; it's just laid out the way a traditional calendar would. Drag the header up once to collapse it to a single row of days, and again to open a month grid — five weeks of day boxes, this month solid and the next faded. Tap any box to make it the current day and drop straight back into the week.
4. Rotate the phone and every view turns with it. On the Dial the ring itself stays where it was in the world while the midnight line, the centre and the controls move to the new top of the screen — so the line sweeps across the dial and shows you the date a quarter-turn away. Turn back and you are on the day you left.
5. Top drawer: tap a date or spin the dial and the top drawer slides down with that day's events. Pull it open to see a timeline of timed events through the day.
6. Bottom drawer: swipe up from the bottom to manage your calendars, anchors and style rings, and to reach Settings.
7. Side panel: tap the handle on the left edge to open your upcoming events, filtered by Past, Today, or from the date you're on.

Import, share & back up

Bring the calendars you already keep onto the dial, share them with the people who matter, and keep your data safe.

1. Import: open Settings → Account & Data → Integrations and connect your Apple calendars to pull existing events onto the dial. You choose which calendars to import, and you can disconnect at any time. You can also import birthdays from Contacts, which arrive as anchors.
2. Edits can go back: turn on Sync edits to Apple Calendar and changes you make to an imported event are written back to the calendar it came from. It's off until you ask for it — writing to your calendars is opt-in.
3. Share a calendar: open a calendar's editor and tap Share to send an invite link — or address it to a contact's email, and the invite appears inside their app the moment they sign in with that address. Whoever accepts sees that calendar on their own dial, and your new events keep flowing to them. Manage everything you've shared (and left) under Settings → Appearance → Sharing.
4. Share your whole dial: from Settings you can send one link that hands someone your entire dial — your calendars join theirs live, and your custom rings and anchors are copied across for them to keep.
5. Merge calendars: combine two calendars onto one ring without losing either. The merge makes a third, combined calendar and leaves the originals intact, so you can un-merge later and nothing has been destroyed.
6. Export: save events as an .ics file for any other calendar app, export your dial as an image to keep or share, or take a full machine-readable copy of your data from Settings → Account & Data → Data & Privacy.
7. Back up: your dial is backed up to your own iCloud automatically, so a new iPhone picks up right where you left off.

Sign in, sync & unlock

Your dial follows you across devices, and the full app is a one-time unlock — no subscription.

1. Sign in with Apple — no separate password to remember.
2. Your calendars, anchors and rings sync across iPhone and iPad automatically.
3. Cronicular is free to use with light ads. A single one-time purchase (£2.99) removes ads, unlocks every theme, and adds unlimited rings.
4. To remove your data entirely: Settings → Account → Delete account.