Get Back Hours Per Week Discover how to improve your workflows and get more focus with this free, in-depth guide to productivity. Criteria for the best calendar app We defined the following metrics to help us evaluate all the iPhone calendar apps objectively: • Easy and fast to view appointments: The best calendar app needs to make it quick and easy to view your calendar. This means it provides different calendar views that are easy to switch between so you can visualize your events in the way that is most helpful to you. • Easy and fast to use for adding new events and finding upcoming ones: The best calendar app needs to have fast and easy event entry. To us, this means great natural language parsing (but more on that in a bit). • Works with necessary services (Google, iCloud, Exchange): If the calendar app can’t interface with the calendar syncing service you’re using, it can’t be the best because the app would be silo’d to your iPhone only. The best calendar app for iPhone: Fantastical meets all our criteria for a great calendar app, and we recommend it unreservedly for iPhone users of all ages, professions, and varying degrees of busy-ness. Nov 29, 2011 Simple but does what it says The functionality in this app should be built into the iOS calendar by default. You can adjust these colors on your Mac calendar app. It is the easiest to use (for adding/editing events) and the easiest to read (for checking schedules) for most people. Fantastical’s natural language parsing is second to none, making it fast and easy to add events, and it has a simple-yet-powerful design. The week ticker makes it easy to visualize your week ahead, a simple pull switches to a month calendar view, and it supports any calendar you can add to iOS. Fantastical’s design Fantastical has two view options: list view in portrait mode with a week ticker or month calendar sitting on top, or switch to landscape mode for a week “block” view. The views can either just show events, or it can integrate events and iCloud Reminders. • The week ticker is a great way to get a general overview of how busy the upcoming week is and to quickly swipe ahead to a specific date. The ticker shows lines (color coded to your calendars) indicating when you have events throughout each day. • With a simple pull on the week ticker, you can swap it out for a monthly calendar view, making it easy to get an overview of any month and the day of the week a date lands on, etc. Each date on the calendar with events scheduled shows a dot (again, color-coded to your calendars). • If you rotate your iPhone into landscape mode, then you get a week “block” view, similar to what you see in Calendar in OS X. This gives you a great visualization of how your time is blocked out over the next week while also seeing details for each day. From the block view, you can also drag and drop events to change the time and date. Along with these three views, you also have the option to turn on a great dark theme for the vertical interface. It is clear that everything in Fantastical’s design was carefully considered and serves to improve the functionality of the app. What makes Fantastical easy to use Late last year, we took a little poll on Twitter regarding people’s calendar use on their iPhones. The results are not scientifically conclusive, but they do provide some interesting data points. In the poll, we asked people how many events they enter into their iPhone on a weekly basis. Of 179 total responses: • 73% enter 1 or fewer events per day (130 people) • 21% enter an average of 2 events per day (38 people) • 6% enter an average of 3 events per day (10) • Less than 1% enter 4 or more events per day (1) So, 94 percent of the total respondents use their iPhone calendar app two or fewer times per day to enter in a new event, while most of those people actually use it once or less per day. Of the majority who do not enter multiple events per day on the iPhone, we think it’s safe to assume they never become deeply familiar with the user interface of their calendar app. ![]() This unfamiliarity leads to friction when entering events, whether you know it or not, because your brain has to process and re-learn the interface every time you enter a new event. What is an “interface” we are extremely familiar with? Natural language. We say things like “Meet Joe for lunch tomorrow at 12:30” all the time. It’s called “natural language” for a reason — we say these sentences in our conversations, emails, text messages, etc. ![]() A calendar app that can accept and parse natural language is one we can use as infrequently as we want without suffering the consequences of an unfamiliar input interface. With Fantastical, you don’t have to enter text like a computer for the app to understand it. Fantastical has the best natural language input mechanics of any other calendar app, far and away. Not only is it fast and intelligent at parsing just about any event- or reminder-based sentence, but Fantastical has easy-to-understand animations that let us know how the app is translating our words., Fantastical’s animations do more than dazzle: The animations are providing instant feedback on how Fantastical is parsing your words and, more important, they’re teaching you Fantastical’s syntax.
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March 2019
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