Calendar and your time
The calendar puts what you studied, what the plan asks for, your exams and your other calendars in one place. Your time adds up your study time, your streak and your badges. None of it needs switching on: what you study in Filmina is tracked on its own.
Opening the calendar
On Home, at the top left, there's a pill with Home and Calendar: tap Calendar to open it and Home to go back. The calendar covers all your spaces at once, not just one.
Along the top are the month, Today, the Previous and Next arrows, and the view: Day, Week or Month. In Day view the title is that day. In Month view, tapping a day opens it on its own. The view you pick is remembered for next time.
In a narrow window (an iPad held upright, a phone), Week becomes 3 days starting from the one you're looking at, and the arrows move three days at a time. On a phone, the side column goes below the grid and the whole screen scrolls; on a small one, the calendar opens in Day view unless you've picked another.
What you see
Four layers, told apart by their shape and not just their color:
| Layer | What it looks like | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Studied | Solid blocks, at the time you studied. | Tracked on its own while you study. Stretches less than half an hour apart count as one sitting, showing the time studied without the breaks. |
| Plan | Dotted blocks. | The minutes your study plan asks for each day. |
| Exams | At the top of the day, in gold. | The date of each plan. |
| Your calendars | Blocks tinted with the color of each event or its calendar. | The calendars you've connected (see below). |
Above each day it says how much you studied, even when it's zero; for days ahead, how much you planned. A line marks the current time, and the grid opens on the morning.
Tapping a block opens its details alongside: a studied block shows which files and how much of each; a plan block, that day's steps with See the plan; an event, its time and place, with Open in Google Calendar (or Open in your calendar); an exam, See the plan. Tap outside to close it.
At the end of the side column, Show turns Filmina's layers on and off (Studied, Plan and Exams) along with each of your calendars. Calendars from the same account are grouped, with how many are visible ("2/9"), and the eye next to them hides or shows them all at once (Hide all, Show all).
The plan in your week
The plan says how many minutes a day, not at what time. The calendar puts it in the first free slot near the time you usually study (6 pm if it has nothing to go on), between 8 am and 11 pm, without overlapping your events or what you've already studied. If the day is full, it goes at the top as an all-day item. It's a suggestion, and it recalculates by itself when your calendar changes.
If you'd rather study at another time, drag the plan block up or down (on a touchscreen, press and slide it), and it stays there, in quarter-hour steps, even if it overlaps something. It moves within the same day: which day it goes on is up to the plan. The details of a block you've moved say You put it at this time. and offer Back to the suggested time.
The cards in the side column
To the right of the grid there's a stack of cards, like phone notifications: the most important one in front and the rest peeking out below. Tapping what peeks out or swiping sideways moves to the next one, and the dots show where you are. The exam card comes first, then whichever alerts apply right now:
- The upcoming exam, in its space's color: "In 5 days", the date and the bar of steps done. If it's tomorrow or today it says Tomorrow or It's today, how many steps are left and Practice it all. Tapping it opens the plan.
- Busy week, in its place, if you have two or more exams within seven days, each with its date.
- 6 days in a row: from 7 pm, if you have a streak and haven't added to it today. "Study a bit today to keep it going".
- Clashes with your calendar: today or tomorrow, the plan block was moved because you have something on at that time; it says what and where it moved to, with See the day.
- You have a free slot today: the time the plan set aside for you, the first step that's up and Study.
- You have class today: an event today whose name includes one of your spaces ("Calculus II, lecture"), with Take notes, which creates today's class in that space and opens its notes.
- Nice today: once what you've studied reaches what you planned.
The cross on a card dismisses it until tomorrow (Dismiss until tomorrow). It comes back the next day if it still applies. Dismissed cards are remembered in that browser.
At the bottom of the side column is your study time: This week (or Today, or This month, depending on the view) with the time in large type, how many days you studied, the difference from the week before and a bar per day; days ahead are dotted, showing what's planned. Tapping it opens Your time.
Connecting a calendar
So you can see your classes and plans next to what you study, and so your plan never asks you to study when you can't. With no calendar connected, the side column has a Connect a calendar card with a Connect button; once you have one or more, it becomes a row at the end of Show. Both open the Your calendars sheet:
| Service | How it connects |
|---|---|
| Google Calendar | When it's available, Connect takes you to Google to grant read-only access and brings you back to Filmina with the sheet open. All the account's calendars come in, and you turn each one on or off under Show. If the button is greyed out and says Coming soon, it can't be connected that way yet; meanwhile, a Google calendar's .ics link can be pasted as Other calendar. |
| Apple · iCloud | You paste the link of a public calendar. On iCloud.com, open Calendar, tap share next to the calendar, turn on Public Calendar and copy the link. |
| Outlook | You paste the ICS link that Outlook.com publishes: Settings, Calendar, Shared calendars; under Publish a calendar, pick yours and Can view all details, click Publish and copy the ICS link. |
| Other calendar | Any calendar with a link that starts with webcal:// or https:// and usually ends in .ics. |
Connected calendars appear at the top of the sheet, each with its logo, a button to sync now and Remove. Filmina rereads them on its own every half hour. You can have up to ten connected; at ten, you need to remove one to add another. If a link isn't public or doesn't contain a calendar, the sheet tells you right there.
Filmina only reads your calendars, to show them and fit the plan around them. It never writes anything to them.
Mina in the calendar
With the chat open on the calendar, Mina asks How's your week looking?: she can see your exams, what the plan gives you each day and the events in your calendars. The suggestions are What do I have this week?, When should I study? (or whether you'll be ready for the next exam) and What if I can't study today?. How the chat works is in Asking Mina.
Your time
Your time is in your account menu (at the bottom of the sidebar; on a phone, at the top left), and you can also get there by tapping your study time at the bottom of the calendar. The screen is called Your study time and has, from top to bottom:
- The week from Monday to Sunday, with one plant per day that grows with what you studied. A day with nothing is bare soil.
- Current streak and Best streak.
- Every day you studied: one square per day for the last six months, darker the more you studied. Hovering over one shows the day, how long and which files.
- Four figures: This week, Average per day, Days you studied and In total.
- Week by week: one bar per week, with the best one marked.
- What you studied: your files sorted by time. Tapping one opens it.
- Badges: all of them, the ones you've earned with their date and the rest with how far you have to go.
What counts as study time
Time inside a presentation or a note counts: listening to or reading the explanation in the viewer, practicing or reviewing, with a note open, or talking to Mina about that file. It counts while Filmina is in front and you've touched it in the last three minutes, or while Mina is speaking even if you don't touch anything. Reading a document or a book in the reader, listening to audio or video you uploaded, and opening a summary or a mind map don't add to this number: what you read or hear in the reader counts as studied for Practice and Review, which is a different thing. Home, Materials and the calendar don't count either. When in doubt, it doesn't count: the number is what you really studied.
A class you record counts too, while the microphone hears someone speaking. See Recording a class.
The study day ends at 4 am in your time zone: what you study at 1 am counts toward the day before. In the grid, today's column and the current-time line follow the clock.
Your streak
A day counts toward your streak with ten minutes of study or the daily review (the Practice questions that come back that day; see Practice and review). It's small on purpose: a streak that asks for an hour a day stops being a nudge. Today never breaks anything until it's over.
The streak is forgiving. Each full week in a row stores a log of firewood, up to two, and a day without studying burns one instead of breaking the streak. With no firewood left, the fire goes out: there's no penalty, your best streak stays, and it lights up again the next day. In Your time, a day where you studied something but didn't reach ten minutes looks paler, with the rule shown underneath.
On a day that counts, when you go back to Home, One more day appears once: the number going up, the week with today lighting up, and a line saying how far you are from your best streak or whether tomorrow makes a week or a month. It has Continue and See your time. It doesn't appear on the first day, or in the middle of a practice session or an explanation.
Badges
Eleven badges, earned by studying rather than by using the app:
| Badge | How you earn it |
|---|---|
| First file finished | You listened to a whole file. |
| Five files | You finished five files. |
| 25 concepts | You remembered 25 concepts well. |
| 100 concepts | You remembered 100 concepts well. |
| 90 in practice | You reached 90 in a practice session. |
| A week in a row | Seven days in a row studying. |
| A month in a row | Thirty days in a row studying. |
| First oral | You explained a topic out loud. |
| First exam taken | You marked the exam you were studying for as taken. |
| Plan complete | You got to exam day with the whole plan done. |
| 10 hours of (space) | Ten hours studying that space. There's one per space, and each space's plan shows how far you have to go. |
When you earn one, You earned a badge appears, with See my badges and Continue. Plan steps and finished days get their own smaller celebration; see Study plan.
Notifications and emails
Filmina gets in touch when an exam is coming up or when it's a good moment to review, at the right time for your time zone. There are two channels: browser notifications and email. Both are managed in Settings: Notifications, with On this device (which only applies to that browser), and Emails, with four switches.
Your browser asks for notification permission the first time you start a study block, so it can tell you when it ends, or when you finish a file or a practice session, with "shall I let you know when it's time to review?" (Let me know or Not now). On iPhone and iPad they arrive once Filmina is installed on your home screen; see Phone and offline. With notifications on, some reminders arrive that way instead of by email.
| Switch | What you get |
|---|---|
| Before each exam | The morning after you make the plan, that day's steps. A week before the exam, the countdown. Three days before, a reminder that it's time to practice, and the night before, one last note. The day after, how did it go?, if you haven't answered in the app. And if the plan was left without a date, three days later it asks you to set one. |
| Your week | On Sunday evening, your week: minutes, days, streak, what you studied, badges and the next exam. If you didn't study at all, it isn't sent. |
| Study reminders | Reviewing a file you finished, the next day and three days later, if you haven't reviewed or practiced it. As notifications only: in the morning, the Practice questions that come back today, and at night, if your streak of three days or more ends today and you have no firewood. Also, if you haven't uploaded anything two days after signing up, and if you've stopped studying for a few weeks, one that asks what happened. |
| Filmina news | What's new in Filmina, every now and then. |
You get at most one of these a day. If two fall on the same day, the one closest to the exam wins.
Account and payment emails always arrive, with no switch. With notifications on, you're also told when your explanation minutes are running low or have run out, and when the material you uploaded, the summary of a new file or the transcript of a recording is ready.