Fantastical 2: My Favorite Calendar App
Since I began blogging, I’ve reviewed two calendar apps—Peek Calendar and Cal by Any.do. To be honest, I like them both quite a bit, but for power users there may be a better option—Fantastical. Fantastical is an award-winning calendar and to-do app for iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Purpose & Functionality
Fantastical provides all the necessary calendar functionality in a beautifully designed UI with the added benefits of natural language input, powerful search and a customizable notification center widget.
Rating: simplicity, usefulness, beauty and necessity
- Simplicity. (9/10) Fantastical makes creating new to-dos and events as easy as speaking. Type or speak (using Siri) “lunch at Tito’s Pizza every Friday at noon with Jon and Tory,” and Fantastical will create a recurring event with all the details in the right fields.
- Usefulness. (10/10) Like most calendar apps, Fantastical is incredibly useful. Fantastical supports any calendar available in the native iOS calendar—iCloud, Google Calendar, Exchange, Yahoo and others.
- Beauty. (9/10) Fantastical offers dark and light modes, customizable calendar colors, an interactive notification center widget and more. All this is available beneath an intuitive UI, easy-to-read typography and smooth animations. It’s truly a beautifully designed app on every platform.
- Necessity. (8/10) The native iOS 8 calendar app is good, but for those of you who want something a little bit more, Fantastical is the best app available.
- Stickiness. (7/10) Calendar apps aren’t incredibly sticky for me, but since Fantastical has been lauded as the best Calendar app for years, it may just pass the test of time.