Fantastical 2
Flexible, efficient scheduling and life management
$49.99 From Flexibits, flexibits.com Needs OS X 10.11 or later
Out of the box, your Mac already ships with Calendar, which might leave you wondering exactly why you’d spend $49.99 on Fantastical 2. The answer is threefold: flexibility, speed, and ease of use.
Naturally, it works with more than just local calendars, plugging in to Office 365, iCloud, Google, and Yahoo among others, so you can mix your personal and business appointments while keeping them separately filed. Version 2.5 even integrates with Meetup.com, using your Meetup credentials there to pull in local events you’ve shown an interest in, even if you’ve not signed up to attend. Any you have signed up for will be marked as accepted, just like any regular meeting requests.
You can add to any calendar for which you have editing rights using plain English “Job interview in Manhattan at 3pm on the 15th”, for example — and Fantastical 2 will parse the sentence and drop the appointment into the appropriate slot. It can even take travel time into account when setting alerts, so if everything runs to time you shouldn’t be late. If you’re more specific with the location of your appointment, it’ll even add a map to the pop–out event overview.
You can avoid calendar overload by organizing your schedules into groups and switching between them with keyboard shortcuts. So, you might split off multiple business calendars from the handful you track home and family events on, and create a separate group for anything else you subscribe to. You can then isolate different event types — or show them all together when you need to find an empty slot.
Fantastical does more than just wrangle your calendars, though, as it also plugs in to Reminders. This is a boon if you’ve only licensed it for macOS, as reminders you set with Siri while driving, for example, will be waiting in your schedule, on your Mac, when you get back home or to work.
It isn’t cheap but, used diligently, it will make sure you’re in the right place at the right time – which, for business users at least, may be enough to recoup the cost sooner than you think.
the bottom line. We won’t be going back to the default Calendar app, but if you’re not ready to take the plunge, check out the free trial first.