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.

Cardhop, the wonderful contact management app from Flexibits, just got big updates on Mac and iOS.

The latest releases bring a whole bunch of handy new features and improvements — including new templates and template settings, iMessage stickers, and support for multiple business cards.

Apple’s Contacts apps are terrible. On both iOS and Mac, they’re opaque, confusing and frustrating to use. Cardhop is a brand-new contacts app for iPhone and iPad that is better than the built-in app in almost every way.

Here’s how to add a new contact without typing a thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

The Apple Design Award winners are in, and they showcase the cutting edge of game and app design.

At a ceremony Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple handed out 12 awards to the best apps of the past year. Games scored half of the nods, with some really cool productivity, finance and utility apps also taking honors.

Here are all of this year’s winning apps — and why they won.

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.

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.