Automated Calendar Cleaning

Removing past events from the calendar is a tedious job – click on the event, click setting, pick delete, then confirm.

With this application you can set it up once, start the service and forget about it - it will keep your calendar clean without further intervention from you until you decide to modify the setting or to stop it explicitly from the application.

The application has very limited settings - you have to choose how many days of past events you want to keep in each one of your calendars and that is about it. The default value is 0 days for all calendars that you own, which is a very good value - I use it all the time. It removes every event from yesterday or older.

In the settings menu you have an option to clean only the calendars that you own or all calendars that you have configured. Seems that I am able to "remove" official holidays, which don't really disappear from the Google Calendar web interface, but are not longer visible on the phone. Bug or a feature, I find that option very useful. The option is disabled by default and you should keep it this way if it gives you any grief.

The application user interface is already translated to English, Spanish, French and Russian. Please contact me by e-mail if you want to help with translation to German.

A known limitation with the application is that it currently insists on cleaning all calendars that you own. If for some reason you want to exclude some of them your only option is to set the number of days to keep to some big value - I have put 3660 in the drop down just for that purpose. If you would like to keep more than 10 years of all event please do not install this application, but drop me an e-mail so I can judge how much interest is in improving this.

Please don't stop the service through the Manage Applications. Although that will work temporarily, the service will restart when you reboot your phone and start cleaning your calendar again, using the last saved settings. The right way to stop the service is from the application itself and it takes just one button. After that the service will stay stopped until you decide to start it again.

This application reads your calendar and removes entries from your calendar, which is considered write to the calendar. It does NOT create entries in the calendar and does NOT send mail. The explanation for the WRITE_CALENDAR permission includes sending mail for some reason. There is no “send email” permission in the API at all, so there is nothing I can do about that.