Birthdays

[keilmillerjr]

How do I add and edit birthdays? I assumed they would be under Settings -> Family Members -> Edit, but there is no option. Clicking on the Birthday widget does not reveal an edit option either.

[sandydargoport]

Hey @keilmillerjr - sorry this was one that I never generalized. I've rewritten how it works, available in upcoming 1.18.0. Birthdays read from any calendar you've connected, including a local Prism calendar, so adding one is a matter of putting it on a calendar and letting Prism pick it up.

To add a birthday:

1. Make it an all-day event, not a timed one
2. Put the word birthday in the title
3. Put it on any calendar you can write to, including your own local Prism calendar

Examples
Event Title -> Birthday Widget Title
Grandma's Birthday -> Grandma
Birthday - Grandma -> Grandma
Grandma's Birthday (1948) -> Grandma, and shows her age

Add the year in brackets if you want the age shown. Without it you still get the date and the countdown.

For an anniversary: exactly the same, using the word anniversary.

For anything else you want to commemorate: make it all-day, set it to repeat yearly, and include a 4-digit year in the title. No keyword needed, so Ana and Ben (2005) works.

What deliberately won't be picked up:

• Timed events. Only all-day entries count, so "dinner for Sam's birthday" stays a dinner.
• Read-only calendars you subscribe to, like school or public-holiday feeds. So, "No School - Martin Luther King's Birthday" doesn't become a family birthday countdown by default.
• Titles describing the celebration rather than the day: party, prep, dinner, lunch, celebration, sleepover.

Deleting a birthday in Prism now also sticks. It won't reappear on the next sync, so you can prune the list without touching the underlying calendar.

In the future, two other ways these will arrive, in case either suits you better: birthdays saved on your iCloud or CardDAV contacts come through if you tick "contact birthdays" when connecting iCloud, and Google Contacts. You can follow it here: #75