When Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland started building a calendar app for the Mac in 2010, their goal was simple: fix everything bad about iCal. The two-man team behind app developer Flexbits particularly hated how hard Apple’s calendar app made it to add events, so they built a natural-language parser that allowed you to type “Dinner with Kim 7PM next Thursday” and have the event automatically slot into exactly the right place. That became the core feature of Fantastical, the app Flexbits launched in 2011. It’s also about the only thing Flexbits hasn’t totally overhauled in Fantastical 2 for Mac, the brand-new, far more powerful app launching today.
Fantastical 2’s most important new feature is a full-size app window. The app previously existed only in the Mac’s menu bar, where a quick keyboard shortcut would drop your calendar down over whatever you were doing, so you could quickly add or check something. Now there’s a dedicated app window, which looks like, well, a calendar app. It has day, week, month, and year views, as well as a list of calendars on the left side. It’s pretty, and laid out similarly to most calendar apps you’ve seen.
That’s also, Simmons says, the best way to really dig in and get schedulin’. He says he’d noticed himself using apps other than his own whenever he needed to really organize his time, and thought, “why am I using another app? Why wouldn’t I want to make my experience better?” Fantastical set out to simplify the Mac calendar experience; Fantastical 2 is all about making it more powerful.
The Year View in Fantastical 2 for Mac.
Fantastical
This is the part where I should say I’ve been a Fantastical user since the beginning. I’m a dangerous combination of forgetful enough to be totally reliant on my calendar, and lazy enough not to enter anything if it takes effort. Fantastical made creating events as easy as typing a sentence, and suddenly I stopped missing meetings. In the week or so I’ve been beta-testing Fantastical 2, I still mostly use it for quick, simple interactions—am I free at 2? Yes? Okay, “Check-in with Joe at 2.” Done. There’s a new, flatter, Yosemite-inspired design, and a lot more color, but for me, Fantastical is still Fantastical.
This new iteration is capable of much, much more, though. Simmons says the bulk of his work with co-founder Sutherland was building a new CalDav engine—CalDav is the protocol used to send calendar information—so that they can send much richer information about alerts and recurring events, much more quickly. (He also cryptically hinted at using that engine to send more than just calendar events, but wouldn’t elaborate.) There are also new “Calendar Sets,” groups of calendars that you can toggle to quickly switch between different contexts. You can see eight (or however many you want) different calendars at work, and when you get home see up to eight others with just one click. It can even switch automatically, using your location to figure out when you get home or to the office.
In the full window view, seeing weeks and months at a glance is really simple: There’s a neat scrubber in the year view that pops up your events for whatever day you’ve hovered over, and days are color-coded by how busy you’ll be. Flexbits did clever work with a hard job: it maintained the app’s core simplicity by communicating a lot with just quick glances and interactions, but it also created powerful tools and features for those who really want to go to war with their schedule. The “Mini Window” in Fantastical 2.
Fantastical
The language-recognition tool is even better now, too. With just “alert 15″ at the end of your event title, you can program it to tell you 15 minutes ahead of your meeting to actually, you know, leave for the meeting. You can also specify time zones for your meeting, or use “float” to keep your morning routine the same no matter where in the world you are. (If you travel a lot, you’ll know how shifting time zones can ruin your schedule.) When you write, “Take out the trash every other Wednesday and Thursday at 8PM,” it’ll nail it. You can use these tools to quickly create either calendar events or reminders, which sync with iCloud and thus other Apple devices.
On one hand, the app is made to make keeping your calendar easier. On the other, it’s a crazy-powerful tool for hardcore calendar-keepers. At $49.99, however, it’s priced only for that second group. (It’s only $39.99 while it’s brand-new, though, so hurry!) The previous version sold well at $19.99, though, even that price rankled some potential purchasers. You also need to buy the app separately on iPhone, iPad, and Mac; being a Fantastical user on all three platforms will set you back a whopping $65.
Simmons says that the Mac App Store has lots of best-selling apps well above this price, and that’s certainly true, but the biggest reason for the increase seems to be Flexbits’ desire to communicate that Fantastical 2 is not an update. It is a bigger, better thing, a totally new experience. Beyond that, whether you need $50 worth of calendaring power in your life is between you and your next missed appointment.
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