While the App Store has quite a few calendar apps, I don’t end up using most of them because while they usually look better than the default calendar.app on iOS, they don’t offer enough to warrant me removing the calendar.app with its icon that tells you the day and date from my homescreen. I’ve been using Siri for most of my Calendar related work but we all know how slow Siri is sometimes. Preshit told me about Fantastical a while back and I ended up buying it a few days later. It is by far the best calendar app I have ever used. With its natural language processing, super fast entry and amazing looks, Fantastical is an app you need on your Mac. Today Fantastical by Flexibits releases on the iPhone.
I have been using the app for a few days now and it has already secured a spot on my homescreen. The app has everything you love about its Mac counterpart and more. There’s a quick guide showing you how to navigate between views by pulling down when you launch the app. The app looks a lot like the Mac app that sits in your menu bar on OS X. Fantastical for iPhone has two main views you can toggle for looking at your schedule. The calendar view is just like it is on the Mac with a nice calendar on top with your events for the day listed below. You can tap on any day and view the events or swipe across months. Coming back to the schedule for today is very easy and all it takes is a tap on the bar on month name in the navigation bar. Pulling the calendar down toggles the DayTicker view which is my favourite section. You can swipe through days here and see your events go by below. The DayTicker has a magnifying glass on the day you are looking at below and lets you blaze through your events. There is a small tear between two days if they are not consecutive. Every aspect of this is executed perfectly. I can’t imagine using a calendar app without it now. It is one of those things that makes you wonder why it hasn’t existed till today. A slight pull down brings up the search bar that lets you search by title, location, invitees or all sections. I know a lot of people dislike the concept of skeuomorphism and it has gotten a bad name recently thanks to over-exaggerations of certain tech sites. Fantastical has the right amount of it. It looks amazing and every little bit just proves to you how skeuomorphism can be great as well.
The event entry bit is why I started using this app on the Mac. It has great natural language processing and it shows you bits of your text flitting down into each individual section as you type a sentence. They even allow you to make typos here and everything is recognized perfectly. If you’re on an iPhone 4S or later or iPod Touch 5th Generation, you can use voice dictation here. There is no faster way to add events. The animations and everything here is so good that I often add events just to see them and eventually delete them. After you click add, the page folds into the date on the DayTicker or Calendar. You can also long press a date to add an event.
The icon for Fantastical for iPhone was done by The Iconfactory and is a joy to have it on my homescreen. The icon is spectacular and a brilliant take on their Mac app icon. It makes you want to launch the app and use it more.
Fantastical for iPhone is beyond amazing. You don’t need to spend time learning new things here. Everything is simple and beautiful. It changes your workflow for the better. Many apps come along that just look great but have limited functionality. Fantastical gets everything right. It also supports the URL scheme for events in Launch Center Pro and Pythonista. It is a game changer. I just wish Flexibits had added some sounds in it from the Mac version. There also needs to be an easy way to go to a certain date instead of swiping through months or days. Fantastical is the calendar app you need. It is available on the App Store for an introductory price of $1.99.