Fantastical
Get a smarter calendar to help manage your busy schedule
Unless you have the memory of several elephants and are the most organized person around, it’s likely that you make use of a digital calendar. Apple’s own Calendar is a good app in this field. It’s easy to use, has a design that marries clarity and elegance, and is mostly reliable. On that basis, you might wonder why you would need to upgrade to something else, but any doubts you have will disappear as soon as you start using Fantastical ($40, flexibits.com).
The app started out differently from most of its rivals, which tend to be very traditional in nature. Instead, Fantastical lived in the menu bar and used natural language input. Rather than having you input details into various fields, the app encourages you to type as if talking to an assistant, interpreting your words and extracting
the details on your behalf. This level of convenience made it a must-buy for a large number of Mac users, many of whom had enjoyed its charms on iOS.
A new lease of life
With version 2, Fantastical grew up. Rather than being an accessory to Apple’s Calendar, the app’s developer decided it was time to replace it. Now, we have an app that betters Apple’s in almost every way. Fortunately, Fantastical hasn’t lost touch with its roots. Although it’s now a full app, Fantastical’s menu bar component remains, providing you with fast access to the month’s calendar and upcoming events, along with the ability to input details for a new event or search for an existing one.
Fantastical’s menu bar icon proves useful, too; it shows today’s date by default, but you can optionally add the weekday or month, or set it to detail today’s remaining events or incomplete tasks. The menu can be invoked with a click, or by pressing ≈+ Alt+Spacebar. (You can edit this shortcut in the app’s General preferences.)
The big picture
Fantastical’s main window is more like Apple’s app – with day, week, month, and year views – though with a large sidebar on the left. The sidebar houses a small calendar that initially shows the current month, beneath which is a list that summarizes your events.
That list is the other big benefit over Calendar, since it gives you a very quick and easy way to scroll through upcoming events; this encourages focus compared to scanning events across many days on a traditional calendar.
However, the sidebar and main view are linked to each other, so selecting something on one updates the other, ensuring both are zeroed in on the same event. Each view therefore actually reinforces the other, providing useful context.
Make a date with destiny
You can add new events from either part of Fantastical’s window – the process for doing so in the sidebar is outlined in the guide to the left. In short, you can often type a description of an event like you would say it out loud, and Fantastical will understand what you mean. Calendar makes a stab at doing this, too, but isn’t as smart regarding nuance and details. For example, “Meet Christian at 11am at Starbucks for two hours on Friday, and set an alarm 30 minutes before” works perfectly in Fantastical. In Calendar, the meeting’s duration is reduced to an hour and lacks the alarm, which you then have to set manually. This isn’t to say Fantastical gets everything right every time, because it doesn’t. But experiment a bit and, where necessary, learn its vocabulary and you’ll find it’s a great timesaver – far superior to Calendar for adding events using plain language.
Set up for success
Another area in which Fantastical beats Apple’s app is calendar management. To be fair, the latter is simpler, listing all your calendars in its sidebar, where you can show or hide them individually based on want you need to see.
With Fantastical, the process is more involved, but it can be automated in an interesting manner. In the Calendars section of the app’s preferences, you can turn on and off individual calendars, and you can also create calendar sets, which enable you to show or hide several at once. You can switch between sets manually in View > Calendar Sets, using the pop-up at the bottom of the sidebar (or using the keyboard shortcuts listed there), or automatically, based on your location. So, you can arrive at work and have your office calendars ready and waiting, go home and see your personal ones – and, we guess, go on vacation and occasionally stare at a calendar that states “Vacation! Yay!” as an all-day event every day for your blissful time away.