VANTAGE CALENDAR

ADD SOME FLAIR TO YOUR DATES $7.99 | vantage-app.com Developers are going out of their way to reimagine how a mobile datebook should look and function. 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 fullscreen, complete with all the typical details found in other apps. Vantage does have a few clever tricks up its sleeve. Events can be assigned colours, fonts and stickers to make them stand out in the timeline. Such embellishments currently won’t sync to other calendar apps, though. 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 coloured 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 centre 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, you 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.