Fantastical 2.2
A businesslike update to our favorite Mac calendar app
$49.99 Developer Flexibits, flexibits.com Requirements OS X 10.10 or later
Fantastical has evolved over the years from an intelligent miniature calender and reminders app that lived in the menu bar to a fully fledged, fullscreen replacement for Apple’s stock app, boasting support for multiple calendar accounts and iCloud.
The app uses a color-coded layout to display your schedule and helpfully integrates
reminders into your daily dealings. Key to its function is a list view of your upcoming events and reminders that augments the main window, and remains active regardless of the layout.
The alternative calendar app has also won over plenty of fans thanks to its use of natural language processing to create calendar events and reminders from simple text entries. It now also recognizes partial matches for place names.
Existing accounts can be added from the Accounts pane of System Preferences or chosen from within Exchange, and you can link manually to accounts from within the app. This version also brings a new interface to the app for Exchange users that enables easier discovery of contact and meeting rooms availability, as well as the in-app ability to send and respond to meeting invitations. Elsewhere, multiple event drag-and-drop and the facility to “float” different time zones alongside each other are great for cross-continent administrators.
The big news here comes for corporate users. With its support for shared calendars, Google Hangouts and global address list lookup, plus the many other benefits for Exchange users, Fantastical 2.2 has laid down a marker for business calendar apps.
the bottom line. The update marks a coming of age for the quintessentially convenient alternative to Apple’s stock Calendar app. tim hardwick