When it comes to calendar apps for iPhone, Fantastical and Horizon are at the forefront. Both of them have natural language parsing for event creation and Horizon goes the extra mile with weather integration. Agenda has been around for a long time and it has been one of the more flexible calendar apps out there. As of today, Agenda 4.0 (henceforth Agenda) for iPhone is available as a separate app and it packs way too many great features that will please every kind of user, especially power users.
If you’ve used Agenda before or even Fantastical for iOS for that matter, the interface will seem familiar. Everything within the app is very neat and tidy and the fonts used make it great. Subtle gradients are thrown into the picture when most other people are going flat. Agenda has always had multiple ways of looking at your schedule. You can navigate between the different ways of looking at your events by swiping to the left or right. Swiping to the right a few times depending on where you are brings you to the settings screen. The three calendar views are the half yearly view that shows you 6 months at a glance like any small pocket calendar, the split view that is similar to Fantastical’s main view and the event view. The split view also allows you to collapse the month on the upper half of the screen into a nice little desk calendar-esque cell. The subtle animations and things you can customize in the app are amazing. I’m a huge fan of in app sounds and Agenda has some really nice interface sounds scoring extra brownie points with me. The event view lets you scroll through your events vertically. What’s great about Agenda 4.0 is the ability to scroll through your calendar events grouped with your reminders. Agenda can access your device calendar and reminders allowing it to work with them and have the advantages of background sync. There is a nifty edge swipe from the right side of the screen that gives you a quick way of switching months.
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The two things that really set this app apart for me are the sharing functions for events and the multiple ways to create events. When you tap on an event, its detail view slides in and you can share the event to apps like Clear, Drafts, Things, Omnifocus, Due or mail the event details as well. Agenda lets you select Chrome as your browser, Google Maps or Waze as your mapping service for location data and even choose your telephone preferences. Agenda can use the in build phone app, Skype and Google Voice (through third party apps like GV Mobile+). The event creation settings lets you select between Agenda Mini, Agenda Expanded, iOS default and Fantastical. Agenda Mini mode can be used for quick entry. It lets you enter the title and select the start and end times. Tapping the clock lets you make the event an all day event. Agenda Expanded is much more detailed giving you location options, alert options and the ability to add contacts. Fantastical has an amazing natural language parser and the app is most known for that on iOS and Mac. Agenda lets you leverage that if you have Fantastical installed on your device by launching Fantastical for event entry and using the x-callback-URL to come back to Agenda after creating the event. There are additional settings for badge behaviour, calendar display options and a toggle for turning sound effects off.
Agenda 4.0 is a solid update to an already good calendar app. It makes use of everything I love and I can’t think of anything bad to say about it. The sharing functions are great, third party integration is stellar and the app just looks great. The app icon is a true representation of the main interface within the app and it has definitely grown on me. I wasn’t a fan of the Agenda 3.0 icon and this icon is definitely homescreen worthy. I hope it gets an update to support the iPad soon because there is still no great calendar app for iPad. Agenda 4.0 is available on the App Store for $1.99.