The desk's own schedule

This is the guide that ships inside the app (Settings → Schedule → Read the schedule guide).

The desk can write the morning brief and check your alerts by itself, with its window closed: on a Mac through launchd, on Windows through Task Scheduler. Nothing else needs to be installed. It is off until you turn it on, and until then nothing is made unless you run a brief or an alert check yourself.

Turning it on

1. Open Settings → Schedule.
2. Pick the time and the days (Monday to Friday, or every day).
3. Choose whether the alert checks run too.
4. Press Turn on.

The card then shows the next brief and the last run of each job. Remove switches it off again; your chosen time is kept for next time.

On a Mac, move the app to your Applications folder and open it from there before turning the schedule on. An app still on the disk image, or in the temporary copy macOS runs a downloaded app from, can't be scheduled, and the desk says so.

What runs, and when

• Morning brief: at the time you chose, weekdays or every day. It fetches prices, writes the brief, and sends it to the channels you turned on.
• Alert checks: every 15 minutes, if you ticked them. They check your alert rules and send at most the daily limit.

Each run starts the app without a window. It does the same work as running a brief by hand, and shows a notification on this computer for anything new.

When the computer is not running

The schedule is only as reliable as the computer. Plainly:

• It only runs while you are logged in. If you are logged out, nothing runs.
• Mac, asleep at the time: the brief runs when the Mac wakes.
• Mac, switched off or logged out at the time: if the alert checks are on, the first alert check

within three hours of its time writes the brief. If that try fails, the desk tries again at the next check an hour or more later: at most twice that day, an hour apart. Later than three hours, or with the alert checks off, the brief is not written by itself that day.

• Opening the app never writes a brief by itself. If the Mac missed today's brief, Today says

"This morning's brief was not written because the computer was off or asleep", with a Run brief now button. A brief you run that way is shown in the app; it is not sent to your phone.

• A late brief says so: its notification reads "written 09:12; the computer was off or asleep

at 07:30". There is never more than one scheduled morning brief a day.

• Windows, switched off at the time: the brief runs at the next chance, when the computer is on

and you are logged in.

• Alert checks only run while the computer is awake. Nothing is checked while it sleeps, and the

checks missed during sleep are not replayed.

• Times follow the computer's own clock, the one in the menu bar or the taskbar. If you travel

with a laptop, the brief comes at your chosen time on the clock it shows where you are.

If a message did not come, open the Alerts page: it lists every brief and alert the desk made. If a day is missing there, the desk did not run that day.

When your trial has ended

After the trial ends the desk is read-only until you buy or enter a key. A schedule that is already on keeps starting the app, but nothing is fetched or written, so no brief and no alert check is made. Settings → Schedule says so. Remove still works.

Removing it

Settings → Schedule → Remove. It removes the schedule and its files; your chosen time is kept for next time.

Remove the schedule before you delete the app. On a Mac, if you drag the app to the Bin without removing it first, the schedule removes itself once the app has been missing for three days. Until then each run finds the app missing and does nothing. If the app comes back in the meantime (an update that replaced it, for example), the count starts again. While the folder or the drive that holds the app is not there at all (an external drive that is not connected), it waits and removes nothing. On Windows the uninstaller removes your Trading Desk tasks for you.

If another program already sends your brief

If something else on this computer already sends your brief, the desk tells you in Settings → Schedule and asks before it installs its own, so you do not get every brief twice.

Advanced: terminal commands and where the files are

You do not need any of this to use the schedule.

From a terminal:

desk schedule install --time 07:30 --days weekdays      # add --no-alerts for the brief only
desk schedule install --dry-run                         # show what it would do, change nothing
desk schedule status                                    # what is set, the next and last runs
desk schedule remove                                    # --dry-run shows what it would remove

From a source checkout, desk install-app builds the app the schedule starts.

• Mac: the schedule is two launchd agents in the LaunchAgents folder of your Library, named

uk.futureinvoked.tradingdesk.morning.ID.plist and uk.futureinvoked.tradingdesk.alerts.ID.plist. If you deleted the app without removing the schedule, they remove themselves after three days; to remove them at once, unload each with the commands below and delete the two files. A file ending in .missing beside a plist notes when its app was first found missing; it is deleted when the app is found again.

• Windows: Task Scheduler → Task Scheduler Library → Trading Desk, with the tasks "Morning brief

ID" and "Alerts ID". A copy of each task's XML is kept in the desk's var/schedule folder.

• ID is 8 characters that tell one desk folder from another, so two desks on one computer never

replace each other's schedule.

• Logs are in the desk's var/logs folder: schedule-morning.log and schedule-alerts.log. Each run

ends with a line such as "--- Trading Desk job morning finished TIME exit CODE"; exit 0 is a good run. On a Mac, launchd's own output is in schedule-morning.launchd.log and schedule-alerts.launchd.log.

launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/uk.futureinvoked.tradingdesk.morning.ID
launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/uk.futureinvoked.tradingdesk.alerts.ID