Fantastical has been my go-to calendar app for years. It’s interface and ease of use is second to none, especially Apple’s terrible Calendar app.
But Fantastical hasn’t received much love on the Mac in awhile. While the iOS version has continued to steadily iterate, the app’s design and basic feature set on the desktop has basically stayed the same.
Today Fantastical 2 for Mac arrives, bringing a complete design revamp for OS X Yosemite and several major new features.
“When Fantastical came out 4 years ago, our goal was to reinvent the calendar app to ease the frustrations of using calendars,” said Michael Simmons of Flexibits. “With Fantastical 2, we challenged ourselves to reinvent Fantastical itself.”
Fantastical 2 still lives in the Mac’s menubar primarily, but now it also has a full calendar window with day, month, and year views. For those who prefer a more standalone app experience, it’s the perfect command center for viewing and managing events.
The natural language parsing engine that Fantastical is famous for has become smarter. It now understands repeating events, such as “HR meeting the third Thursday of every month” or “take the trash out every Friday morning.” Alerts can be added by ending an event’s input with something like “remind me tomorrow at 3PM.”
Events and dated reminders can now be shown together in the main list, and a new feature called calendar sets makes it easy to toggle between different calendar collections with a click. Calendar sets tied to a specific location will intelligently hide or show themselves when the Mac leaves or arrives the area, which is nice if you only want to see work events when you’re actually at work, for example.
For Yosemite, Fantastical has a new Today Widget, Action and Share Extensions for integrating with other apps, and Handoff support for seamlessly moving between the iOS and OS X version.
I’ve been beta testing the new app on my MacBook for the past couple of weeks, and it’s rock solid. The fresh design is great, and I’m still impressed with how the app manages to bake in so many features without feeling confusing.
It’s easy to keep rattling off about what makes Fantastical 2 for Mac er… fantastic. But it’s really something you should just check out yourself. The app is available for a “limited-time launch sale price” of $39.99 in the Mac App Store. Since Fantastic 2 is an entirely new app, there’s no upgrade pricing for existing customers. You can head on over to the Flexibits website for a free trial.
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
8 responses to “Fantastical 2 gets fresh design, new features for OS X Yosemite”
I paid for the iphone app ($5), I paid for the ipad app ($7), I paid for the OS X application ($20). Good grief… a $40 launch sale for the new OS X version? Flexbits – your v1 application is good enough. Is a total investment of $72 realistic for a cross platform calendar application? Maybe it is – I don’t know. But this is a calendar application – not vmware or photoshop
You can always wait for them being part of one of these numerous bundles these days. That’s the way I actually learned about this app some years ago and eventuelly bought it.
I only use it ocassionally though. I like their intelligent creation of events from freely written text. However desperately missing some features, like recurring events, which again have to be set up in Apple’s calendar. So, also wouldn’t pay another 40 bucks, esp. if this feature’s not in this time.
I make recurring events inside Fantastical all the time, albeit on iOS.
I totally agree. I love this app. I have on my phone and on all my computers, but not even a slight adjustment for existing users is not nice. Just give a bit of a break to people that have shown you support for years.
I’m sticking with the old version I got for $20. Paying $60 for a calendar app is just ridiculous.
$50 for a calendar app, you must be kidding. Maybe $50 for a full on multi level game, or Pixelmator, but not a calendar app. The native calendar app works just fine thanks.
$40!!! and is it true its not on all devices? Id love this app. MAYBE if it were across all devices Id pay $20. I do think it looks great but come ON~!!!
I make it a point of never supporting developers who once their app goes popular penalise existing users by making no upgrade path. How you can say, “It’s an entirely new app” is beyond me. It’s not, it has some new features from the the old app. It’s what those of use who are long in the tooth call an “upgrade” and as such should have an upgrade charge. I really object to this lame excuse that is a means for making existing users pay again.