Appointments, easy to read from across the room

Make a calendar just for appointments

Create a new, separate calendar in Google Calendar, iCloud or Outlook and put only medical appointments in it. This matters for two reasons.

First, a television in a living room is seen by whoever is in the room. A separate calendar lets you show appointments on one screen and not another, and lets you turn the card off without touching the family calendar.

Second, the name you give the calendar becomes the heading on the card. Call it “Appointments for Jim” and that is what the TV says. In a house with two people, that alone tells two cards apart.

Copy that calendar’s private link

Google Calendar — on a computer, hover the calendar in the left-hand list, click the three dots, choose Settings and sharing, scroll to Integrate calendar and copy the Secret address in iCal format. It ends in .ics. (Google’s instructions.)

Apple or iCloud — on iCloud.com open Calendar, click the share icon beside the calendar name and turn on Public Calendar. The link begins webcal://, which Theatrium accepts as it is. (Apple’s instructions.)

Outlook and anything else offering an .ics subscription link works the same way.

Add the card and paste the link

On the dashboard, press and hold a panel to change it, choose Appointments, then open Appointments from and paste your link.

Don’t type the link with the remote. These addresses are long and easy to mistype. Email or AirDrop it to yourself, then use the iPhone keyboard prompt that tvOS offers when you select the box.

Choose how much it shows

Two choices, and both matter more than they look.

Next, then what follows shows the next appointment in full with the rest listed underneath. Only the next one shows a single appointment as large as the card allows — the better answer for someone who finds a list hard to take in.

Where, and what to bring shows the location and any notes. Just what and when leaves them off. Choose that if the screen is somewhere visitors see it.

Write appointments so the card can help

No special format is required — an appointment typed the ordinary way works, it just shows less. If you want the card to say more, use fields your calendar already has.

• Title — what it is, plainly: Dentist, Dr Patel – heart clinic. This is also what picks the icon.
• Location — where to go, including the floor or ward: Cabrini Hospital, level 3, clinic B.
• Notes — optional lines the card reads:
  Bring: your medication list
  Prepare: nothing to eat after 8am
  Note: park in the visitors’ car park

Anything else in the notes is shown as it is, so nothing you write is lost.

Someone else can keep it up to date, from anywhere

This is the part that makes the card worth setting up. Whoever manages the appointments does not have to be in the house. A son or daughter in another city, or a carer between visits, adds an appointment in their own calendar app on their own phone, and it appears on the television at home.

Share the appointments calendar with them the ordinary way — in Google Calendar, Settings and sharing › Share with specific people, with permission to make changes to events. It then sits alongside their own calendars, on whatever phone or computer they already use.

Nothing changes at the other end. There is no app for the person at home to open, nothing to press, and no account for them to remember. The appointment is simply there the next time they glance at the screen.

Two things worth knowing if you set it up this way:

• The television can only read. Nobody at home can move or delete an appointment by accident, and the card never writes anything back to the calendar.
• Give it a few minutes. Calendar providers refresh shared links on their own schedule, so something added from a phone is not on the TV the same second. If you are on the phone to someone and want them to see it now, expect a short wait.

It also means the calendar is the single place the appointments live. Whoever books them writes them down once, and the person at home, the carer and anyone else sharing it are all reading the same thing.

The icons pick themselves

Theatrium reads the title and chooses a matching icon — a heart for a cardiology appointment, a tooth-and-mouth for the dentist, a walking figure for physiotherapy, a phone for a telephone appointment. Nothing to set up, and an appointment it doesn’t recognize simply gets a plain calendar icon rather than anything clinical.