- #THE BEST CALENDAR APP FOR MAC PRO#
- #THE BEST CALENDAR APP FOR MAC SOFTWARE#
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- #THE BEST CALENDAR APP FOR MAC MAC#
Take iCal, Apple’s calendar app as an example.
#THE BEST CALENDAR APP FOR MAC SOFTWARE#
And it shows in other ways: some of the software included with the Macs haven’t improved in years.
#THE BEST CALENDAR APP FOR MAC PRO#
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook even touted the iPad Pro as a notebook replacement. iPhones and iPads are a much more lucrative business for them than their notebooks and desktops computers. None of them have launched publicly yet-they’re all in early access-but they’ve each raised millions in venture capital, and they all touch on similar ideas: keyboard shortcuts for faster navigation, natural language event creation, built-in scheduling tools, and one-click access to virtual meetings.For those of us that use Macs, it sometimes feels like Apple is abandoning us. The new calendar warĪ decade after Fantastical’s debut, calendar apps are starting to become cool again, with startups such as Cron, Rise, Amie, Hera, and Magical all looking to reinvent scheduling. Instead, it soldiered on as a darling of the indie app scene, at least until the next calendar craze came along. Simmons says Flexibits entertained similar acquisition offers, but wasn’t interested in having its product killed off. Salesforce acquired Tempo in 2015 and killed it off a month later. Microsoft bought Sunrise in 2015 and shut it down the following year, having integrated some of its features into Outlook. GoDaddy acqui-hired the makers of Canary in 2014 and abandoned the app.
Still, Fantastical’s competition didn’t exactly last.
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Pulling down on the ticker also revealed a month view, and of course the app featured the same natural language event creation as the Mac version. When the iOS version launched in late 2012, the tech press swooned over its slick design, in which a detailed agenda flowed vertically down the page as you swiped across the horizontal “DayTicker” up top. “When we came out with Fantastical, it really was ahead of its time, but we were solving a problem, and people loved it, and off we went,” Simmons says. They formally incorporated Flexibits in 2010 and released the Mac version of Fantastical in May 2011. It was still a novel idea back when voice assistants such as Siri were just getting off the ground.
#THE BEST CALENDAR APP FOR MAC SERIES#
on February 10” instead of filling out a series of input boxes. Simmons had the idea to apply the engine to calendar events so that users could type phrases like “Coffee with Sue at 4 p.m. Their first collaboration was an app for controlling Mac camera preferences, but they quickly pivoted to calendars after Sutherland came up with a parsing engine for natural language. The value of Fantastical’s approach is that it pulls all of your scheduling needs into one place. While these concepts are similar to those of other scheduling services, Simmons points out how odd it is that none of them are built into an actual calendar app.
(Simmons used this feature to book his interview with me last week.) It’s meant for booking individual meetings with lots of people and making sure no one overlaps. For events with multiple guests, users can vote on times that work, and the creator can pick a time based on those responses.įantastical for iPhone The app also has a new section called “Openings,” in which users can designate a broad range of days and times in which they’re available to meet. Recipients get an email with a web link for picking the best slot. While creating an event, you can easily add multiple proposed times. Meeting time proposals in Fantastical The difference with Fantastical Scheduling, Simmons says, comes from being built into the calendar app itself.