Vantage Calendar
$5.99 Developer Fortyfour, vantage-app.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9.0 or later
Is your calendar due a makeover? Developers seem to think so, and are going out of their way to reimagine how a mobile datebook should look and function. Apps like Dial Calendar (reviewed in issue 122) have a lot of great ideas, but visual flair alone isn’t enough to enhance your productivity.
Vantage Calendar is the latest iOS app to give your agenda a facelift, but unlike the competition, this one retains the features people want in this kind of app. The main view resembles a Star Wars
style opening title crawl in reverse, with the current day’s activities at the bottom, grouped into stacks that scroll vertically into the past or future.
You can also scroll through connected iCloud, Google, Outlook, or Facebook Events calendars with a horizontal swipe across the top grid followed by a tap to jump to a specific day. A tap on any event expands to full-screen, complete with all the typical details found in other apps.
Vantage does have a few clever tricks up its sleeve. Events can be assigned colors, fonts, and stickers to make them stand out in the timeline. Such embellishments currently won’t sync to other calendar apps, but too much of that kind of thing would start to look gaudy anyway. It’s great for highlighting the occasional special event, however.
In addition to the main timeline, Vantage Calendar includes weekly summary and hourly schedule views, as well as a mini-month summoned by tapping the current month’s name, which displays events as colored dots. Need more detail? Tap the arrow located at the bottom to expand even further into a slick full-month view, complete with event titles.
Curiously, the app has no landscape mode except on the iPad, where the timeline is surrounded by an excessive amount of dead space. Although you would expect month views to work better on a tablet, they wind up being artificially crammed into the center of the display instead.
We liked the ability to switch an event to a to-do list item, but if you prefer a lot of alert options will be disappointed to find the only available choices are 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, and one day. There’s also no way to search events, although this is being added.
the bottom line. Offers visual flair without sacrificing familiar features, but the iPad version is a work in progress.