Readdle’s new iOS calendaring app, Calendars 5, launched yesterday, and after a day of use I can confidently state that I can find nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it a whole lot. Why? Because it combines your calendars and reminders in one iOS7-style app, and folds in Fantastical-style natural-language entry.
It’s pretty great.
In name, Calendars 5 is the fifth version of Readdle’s Calendars app, but in practice it’s a whole new app that’ll cost you a whole new $5. This is a trend I like – developers who are willing to charge for big app updates.
The app looks great, all flat and iOS7-ready, with a lot if information on a page without looking crowded: The day view, for instance, has the day’s events in the right panel and a day-by-day timeline on the left. There’s also a number bar at the bottom for quick access to any date, and simple labelled buttons at the top for navigating between day, week, month, year and reminders.
Yes, reminders. Your native iOS reminders are incorporated right into the app in their own section, complete with “all” view, a “today” view and an upcoming view. And adding alarms to the timers is even easier than in the native app. Reminders with alerts also show up in the main calendar.
Adding events is easy. You just hit the plus button and type in the appointment in natural language (lunch with mother tomorrow at 3pm, for example) and the app will parse out the details, adding a time, the people and the location. It’s a lot like Fantastical. Actually, it really is a Fantastical copy, complete with animations in which the various parts of your sentence fly to their destinations to give visual feedback.
And of course you can always just use Siri to enter reminders and appointments, because Calendars 5 syncs with your iCloud calendars as well as Google calendars.
It’s $5 well spent, even in the light of Apple’s own excellent new iOS 7 Calendar app, and full of delightful touches: you can tap and drag to reorder your task lists, for example, and the alarm pop ups present options so you can deal with them right there.
Check it now on the app store for iPhone and iPad.
Source: App Store
Thanks: Irene!
