![]() ![]() This is welcome - there’s far too little locational awareness among Mac and iOS apps. You switch between calendar sets using a pop-up menu at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, but Fantastical can even change them automatically based on your Mac’s location. With Fantastical, you can easily separate sets of calendars, so, for instance, I can hide personal calendars for the school district and various clubs I’m in while pondering Take Control release schedule weeks. ![]() It’s not hard to turn individual calendars on and off in Apple’s Calendar, but it gets tedious fast, so most people don’t bother. That can add up to a lot of calendars, and perhaps the most welcome innovation in Fantastical is its concept of calendar sets. It also brings in and displays to-do items from iCloud (the things you’d usually access in Apple’s Reminders app), and can show birthdays and anniversaries based on date information stored in Apple’s Contacts app. Rather than just tie into Calendar’s data, Flexibits wrote their own native CalDAV engine for Fantastical, which gives it direct access to iCloud, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar. In this respect, it’s extremely similar to the company’s well-regarded versions of Fantastical for the iPhone and iPad, and if you already like one or both of them more than iOS 8’sĬalendar app (as I do), you’ll be at home in the Mac version. Notably, Fantastical boasts a left-hand sidebar that shows a mini month view and a highly useful list of both upcoming events and dated reminders (a quick click on a checkmark button switches the list to show only reminders). Flexibits has now expanded Fantastical beyond the menu bar, making it into a standalone app with a full calendar window with standard day, week, month, and year views. The initial version of Fantastical was a focused menu bar utility that extended Calendar by showing your schedule with a click and making it easy to enter new events with natural language processing. It’s always refreshing to see a Mac developer step up to take a swing at the incumbent, and that’s just what Flexibits is doing with Fantastical 2. It’s hard to make a business case for the time and effort necessary to create a new app when you have to convince every customer to switch from a free alternative that’s already installed. However, bundled software has a chilling effect on competition, and thus on innovation. It is of course a good thing that every Mac user has access to a generally capable calendaring app for free - that’s necessary to ensure that OS X remains competitive with other operating systems. #1633: macOS 13 Ventura and other OS updates, 10th-gen iPad, M2 iPad Pro, 3rd-gen Apple TV 4K, Apple services price hikesīundled apps - such as Apple’s OS X Calendar - tread an uneasy path.#1634: New Messages features, Apple Q4 2022 results, Preview drops PostScript, iOS/iPadOS 15.7.1, Dvorak on iPhone and iPad.#1635: Adobe/Pantone quarrel, does Matter matter yet?, OneWorld 65W international charger, corral your email with SaneBox, e3 Software sponsoring TidBITS.#1636: TidBITS wishes Josh a fond farewell, OS security updates, Emergency SOS via satellite details, hands-on at an Apple Store.#1637: Testing Emergency SOS and Find My via satellite, Ventura free space issues, Lock Screen Photo Shuffle joy, Thanksgiving hiatus.
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