Fantastical

Awesome Apps is a new series highlighting the best apps around. We’ll be featuring our favorite apps as well as new and notable apps. Apps are transformative, and these are the best.

Years ago, I decided to ditch my paper Filofax diary for my iPhone, before quickly realizing that Apple’s built-in Calendar app didn’t fully meet my needs. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to find the perfect third-party calendar app for iOS, iPadOS and macOS.

It’s called Fantastical – let me tell you about it.

Apple’s own Calendar app might be relatively well-formed and functional – most of the time – but for anyone looking to take their personal organization to the next level, long-time favorite Fantastical from developer Flexibits is a great option. The app’s wide-ranging feature set makes it easy to add tasks, manage calendars and streamline your productivity. Let’s start with the basics, before looking at some of Fantastical’s power features.

As 2020 thankfully sputters to its conclusion, Apple has released its list of the year’s best 15 apps and games “notable for their positive cultural impact, helpfulness, and importance.”

The App Store Best of 2020 winners cover a multitude of areas — from the Zoom app that more or less defined the year of lockdown to streaming service Disney+ to a nifty sleep app.

This week we pay more for our calendars, shoot with both iPhone cameras simultaneously, share six-second videos like it’s 2015, and save some bookmarks. Take a look at the week’s best iOS apps, both new and updates.

Cardhop, the polished contact management app for Mac from the makers of Fantastical, has finally made the leap to iOS.

The app makes it easier than ever to find contacts and, more importantly, keep your contact lists in order. It looks great, is incredibly fast, and works with all of your existing contacts on iOS.

You’ll never squeeze maximum productivity out of your Mac until you load it up with some fantastic software.

That’s just what you’ll get in the Epic Mac Bundle, featuring Fantastical 2 and PDF Expert. It’s a bundle of eight premium Mac apps that usually costs nearly $500, but right now you can get it for just $22.50 with promo code “LAST25.”

This week we dim our Mojave screens down with a couple of Dark Mode utilities, we get a new Portrait HD mode in Darkroom, and learn how British English Siri pronounces “Fantastical.”

Fantastical, the hugely popular calendar app for macOS, just got a big update that adds a number of features users have been calling for.

With version 2.5, you can now send and receive time proposals for your meetings, link your Meetup.com account to sync your events, and more.

Do you hate adding new events to your iOS calendar? It’s a real pain, right? You have to click, and type, and turn one of these time and date dials, and type some more. On the Mac you can just hit ⌘-N to create a new event, and then type something like Dinner tomorrow at 19:00, and the Calendar app just works out what you mean, and adds the event.

On iOS, you have to do it manually, or try to coax Siri into doing it for you — neither of which is a pleasant experience. Why isn’t there a natural-language input for the iOS Calendar app? Well, if you’re using the awesome Drafts app, then there is.

Managing a busy schedule is something we all deal with from time to time. Relying on a calendar app makes it easier, but entering every meeting, project, or appointment can be a hassle. Fantastical is the best calendar app for adding events to your calendar and managing your schedule.

Remember how Flexibits made managing your calendar incredibly easy with Fantastical? Now it is doing the same for your contacts with a brand new app called Cardhop.

Cardhop makes keeping your address book up to date and staying in touch with friends and colleagues quick and easy. It uses the same great natural language recognition found in Fantastical, and it’s available today on macOS.

Flexibits updated its popular Fantastical apps for iPhone and iPad this morning to take advantage of a number of new features in iOS 9 and on the iPhone 6s. Arguably the biggest improvement to productivity comes in the form of multitasking support for the iPad. Fantastical also threw in a dash of the new iPhone’s 3D Touch as well.

SAN FRANCISCO — The key to crafting great Apple Watch apps can be summed up with a simple mantra: “Make the user happy.”

That’s designer Joe Cieplinski’s approach to all design, really, but the precept is even more important than ever for developers making apps for Apple’s new wearable. Instead of attempting to cram all the features of an iPhone app onto that tiny screen, devs need to focus as much on what they leave out as what they include.

“That’s how you get a successful product,” Cieplinski, who works for Philadelphia-based Bombing Brain Interactive, told Cult of Mac after his AltConf panel here Tuesday. “It’s not just trying to be philosophical.”

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.

Apple has really been upping its game with curated app collections, and today a slew of amazing productivity apps were put on sale as part of a new “Get Productive” roundup in the App Store.

It’s the most impressive collection of app deals we’ve ever seen in the store. Many of the included apps have been discounted by more than 50 percent.

Who says iOS has all the apps? According to new data, Google isn’t just kicking butt when it comes to market share, but also mobile apps as well. The search giant’s Play Store now offers a great selection of titles than the App Store, but Apple fans will argue that quality is more important than quantity.

Thanks to how apps can hook into each other with Extensibility in iOS 8, third-party developers are able to rival the systemwide functionality of Apple’s stock apps like never before.

So is the case with Flexibits, maker of the popular calendar app Fantastical. In a big 2.2 update today, Fantastical has not only been optimized for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but it’s received a number of iOS 8-only features.

iOS 8 will bring Extensions to your iPhone and iPad. Extensions are essentially miniature versions of apps that can be run inside other apps. For instance, if you have Evernote installed on your iPhone, you could pop up the Evernote Extension when you’re running the Mail app, and save a snippet of that email to your Evernote account.

Clearly this is huge. It’s something that Android and Windows Phone users have enjoyed for a while, but Apple has – typically – taken its time to get it right. In fact, you have probably used Apple’s own “test” Extensions already: Whenever you see the Mail sheet roll down inside another app, or you access the built-in Twitter sharing box, you’re using an Extension.

But what kind of things can Extensions do for us? I’ve been thinking about that, and here’s a wish list of Extensions I’d love to see.

Despite all efforts to the contrary, email is still the default way to shift files, photos and – yes – mail around the internet. Even when you share a file using Dropbox, the link goes via old-fashioned email. And yet email clients are still awful. They’ve gotten a lot better in the last couple of years, on both iOS and the Mac, but we’re still stuck without a proper task manager that integrates with the native iOS/OS X Calendar and Reminders.

What’s going on?

Today you may have noticed a little teaser page from Flexibits, makers of the beloved calendar app Fantastical.

“Fantastical 2 for iPhone on your iPad is good,” reads the teaser. “Fantastical 2 for iPad on your iPad is even better.”  There’s a mailing list where you can sign up to get notified when the app arrives.

We’re itching to tell you more, like exactly when the app is coming out and why it’s awesome, but you’ll have to be patient. All that’s being said at this point is that Fantastical for iPad will be a separate download from the existing Fantastical for iPhone. That means new and existing customers will need to pony up a little change.

Stay tuned for Cult of Mac’s full review.

Source: Flexibits

As we approach the end of 2013, it’s time to take a look back and pay some recognition to some of the finest apps that have hit the App Store over the past 12 months.

It’s not easy to build a successful iOS app anymore — with over 1 million of them in the App Store, competition has never been tougher — but some developers have proven it’s still possible to stand out among the crowd with titles that are either completely unique, or just far greater than their rivals.

We’ve picked 15 that you really shouldn’t miss.

I started using Fantastical on my iPhone the day it was released back in November of last year. Like other users of the fantastic (bad pun intended) Mac app, I couldn’t wait to have its natural language parsing on my iPhone. With Fantastical, you can just type “get lunch with Buster at 3 tomorrow” and be done. Far better than the poorly-designed rigamarole that is Apple’s Calendar app.

Today Flexibits, makers of Fantastical, released the biggest update to their iPhone calendar app since its original release. Fantastical 2 for iPhone is a completely new app that works only on iOS 7 and features a new design, new features, and yes, a price.

MacHeist — one of the Mac community’s finest deals-mongers — has just gone live with their latest nano bundle: $250 worth of quality Mac software for the song of $9.99.

Flexibits’ fantastic calendar app Fantastical has reached v1.1. In numerical terms, this is just the addition of 0.1 to the original 1.0. But in terms of app goodness, it’s much more hugerer.

Fantastical and 1Password, two essential applications for any Mac OS X user, have both had their price tags slashed by 50% for a limited time. Fantastical is now down from $19.99 to $9.99, while 1Password is down from $49.99 to $24.99. They’re both available to purchase from the Mac App Store now.