We're suckers for apps that look great: we reckon that if you're going to spend a gigantic amount of time in front of a computer screen, you should at least have something worth looking at. However, design is pretty much infinitely more that what something looks like and we've seen that the apps with the finest appearances tend to be the ones that are designed well in every way. It's not a universal truth but it is with
Fantastical 2.2 for OS X which is gorgeous, powerful and now updated with some delicious extras.
Delicious. Gorgeous. This is just an app, we realize that, and it's just a calendar app which is a term especially worthy of a shrug since you already got one for free with your Mac. Yet we don't use these words lightly; Fantastical 2 is a pleasure to look at and that's very much part of why it also feels like a pleasure to use. There are things we would change, there are things we wish Apple would support in it better and there are design niggles but they are all small issues.
You can see enough from the screengrabs here to tell whether you agree about its appearance but
do also get the trial version from the developer's website because it's in the use that you see the nice attention to detail. What Fantastical aims to do, it seems to us, is actually not to make you look at it a lot: it wants you to get in and out fast. So entering new events has always been speedy, searching for events has always been quick, now 2.2 has added small features that make a big difference in editing events.
Fantastical was one of the first, if not actually the very first, popular calendar app to let you just type in an event in the same way you would tell a human being. Depending on when you enter it, for instance, typing 'Lunch on Tuesday with Mabel' could be automatically entered into your calendar as if you'd actually written 'Mabel Harris lunch, 13:00-14:00, Tuesday April 5 2016'. Fantastical knows that you mean the next Tuesday coming, it knows when lunch is –– and you can change that default for every lunch or adjust just this one. Plenty of calendar apps now do this or similar but Fantastical is still unique in what it does as you actually type: it animates filling in the calendar.
So when you typed the word 'lunch' Fantastical would've begun by guessing you mean today and since it knows lunch is usually an hour, it would pop an hour-long box into the month's calendar view. Then when you typed 'Tuesday' it would automatically move that to the next Tuesday. You can get more specific, adding start times, durations and all along the way you can see Fantastical slotting it into your calendar. We don't very often find that we've done something to pop an appointment on the wrong day but it has happened and the way we catch our mistake is through the way we can see what Fantastical thinks we mean.
The new version 2.2 extends this by letting you click and drag on the appointments as they appear on your calendar: if Fantastical has popped an hour-long box at 13:00 and you want it to be 75 minutes at 13:30, just drag and then extend it. What you type changes the boxes on the calendar view and what you do to those boxes is immediately reflected in the text.
It's one of those improvements that seems extraordinarily obvious –– but only in hindsight. We've watched those boxes slot about and it never occurred to us how much handier it would be to have the ability to give them a shove or two. Now it's hard to go back and it's also hard to quite define when we type and when we click and drag.
It does depend on the view we're in: it seems most useful in the month view and least useful in the week. Yet speaking of obvious improvements neither we nor anyone else has thought of before, Fantastical 2.2 has improved the month view. Since time began, since software existed, every calendar app has shown you one month at a time. Fantastical 2.2 does that but, optionally, you can tell it to always show you one month from now: rather than the 1st of the month being at the top of the screen even as you are nearer the 31st, now today is at the top. So with one glance you're seeing what's coming up over the next few weeks, whether or not that crosses into the next month.
There are also improvements to time: by default now, the day and week views show you the time in a column down the lefthand side but also exactly the same time in a column down the right. Except you can edit that righthand column: you can set it to another timezone with a click. So at a glance, you can always see when an appointment that's perfect for you is actually midnight for the poor soul you work with overseas.
You can also now do more with this checking of people's availability, though this is where we wish Apple did a bit better. For you can't do this if your calendar is on iCloud, you can only do it on Google Calendar or through the newly-added Microsoft Exchange. Fantastical 2.2 adds Exchange report and integrates Microsoft's categorisation of events but it's really Attendee Availability that we long to see appear on Apple.
What it does is speed up finding a time that everyone can meet. You could add an event to your calendar as usual, then type in the name of a colleague and immediately Fantastical shows you that nope, they're not available. This depends on them being on the same system, Google or Exchange, but if they are then it is instant. Only, the way that Fantastical shows you they're unavailable is that it pops an icon next to their name which is an X in a circle. It looks like it means to be a close button; you expect that it's something to click on when you've changed your mind and want to remove this person.
However, when you're deep into the woods of trying to find a time that many people can make, then Fantastical 2.2 is much clearer. You can see a bar-graph like chart of everyone's availability –– you won't see what they're doing but you'll see when they can't fit you in –– and you can drag your meeting along to anywhere you fancy. Or just click a button and Fantastical will snap the meeting to the next time everyone is available.
This bar graph availability feels oddly constrained; it's a very wide but not very tall box which seems squeezed when you're looking at people's available times. If you try it on iCloud you get the same large elongated bar but with an error in the middle; the error is perfectly clear and fine but it looks inelegant next to the rest of Fantastical's design.
Still, it's a smart feature and we want it on iCloud, please. Sort that out, Apple, would you? While we and Flexibits, the makers of Fantastical, wait for OS X to support Attendee Availability, we'd love them to add one more option that would fix our sole addressable criticism. We don't like that availability icon that looks like a close box but we'll get used to it. What we have consistently failed to get used to over the last year since Fantastical 2 came out is how it presents a list view that excludes days where nothing is happening.
The list is excellent, usually. It is a particularly clear view of everything you're doing with this one issue. If you happen to have a busy week yet somehow no meetings on Wednesday, then the list will go Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. We cannot, cannot, cannot count how often we've looked at that list, seen an unbroken chain of events and assumed we couldn't fit something else in.
We can see why we get that wrong but we also repeatedly misread the list somehow so that we think an event is the day before or the day after it really is, simply because of what other days are or aren't shown in the list. If we could just have a setting that said List Empty Days, we'd be sorted.
Whereas we don't know the solution to our other problem, but it's a problem: to move from one month to another, you sometimes have to swipe down and we know it's obvious, we know it's got to be clear, but it throws us. We're just not sure there ever could be a setting to fix our heads so maybe we should just be grateful that there is, for instance, a setting that switches off Fantastical's sounds. The noise of entering a new event, especially when you're wearing headphones, is a bit overly dramatic. Not so say loud.
So maybe we're not fans of the audio side of Fantastical 2.2 but there is a slim chance that you've gathered we like the visuals. We like the visual so much that we forget there are actually two of them: there is the Fantastical app that we're so fond of and there's a Fantastical menubar option. Fantastical actually started as solely a menubar app and so this isn't some small extra, it's so full-featured you could use the menubar without ever opening the main app. When you're in a hurry, when you're working in full or Split Screen, it is excellent to be able to just cursor up to check a date or enter an appointment from the menubar.
That menubar version comes as standard with Fantastical 2.2 and is an option you can switch on or off. Otherwise the versions of Fantastical across Apple devices are all separate: even the iOS ones aren't universal, there is a separate iPhone and a separate iPad one. This is one case where it would be good to be able to buy the trio –– iPhone, iPad and this new Mac edition –– in one go but for now you have to buy each separately.
Fantastical 2.2 for Mac requires OS X 10.10 and
costs $50 in the App Store or
direct from the developer where you can also get a trial version. Note that at time of writing the app is still rolling out across different countries.
Who is Fantastical 2.2 for:
You do need to use a calendar a lot in your life or your work; as gorgeous as it is, it's not a casual purchase. If you're going to use its functions all day every day, though, then it's a bargain and you should be buying it right now.
Who is Fantastical 2.2 not for:
If Apple's Calendar is good enough for you then actually Apple's Calendar is good enough for you: stay with that. Although we would still suggest you look at the free trial version as you may find that Fantastical gets you using your calendar more than ever.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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