Several options for the alert time: on the day of the event, one day, one week or one month before the event. The app comes with a list of autocomplete suggestions for events, which updates itself dynamically when adding events: if the event name doesn't exist in the list, it is added. You can delete suggestions by going to Settings -> Autocomplete For the best experience, I recommend setting the Alert Style of Carminder to "Alerts" in Settings -> Notifications. Kept in sync on all your devices via iCloud. The icons found in Settings are courtesy of the nice people at http://www.visualpharm.com