A useful calendar application just got better.
This week, Flexibits released Fantastical 2 for the Mac.
The new version, which sports a redesigned user interface, also includes a full calendar window with day, week, month, and year views, an intuitive parsing engine, iCloud reminders support, light theme, time zone support, birthday reminders, Action and Share Extensions as well as Handoff support to connect your Mac with your iOS devices.
iCloud Reminders are even better and users can now see their events and dated reminders together in the main list. Reminders can be quickly created by starting sentences with “reminder”, “todo”, “task”, or “remind me to.” Users can also add dates, times, and location-based geofences (when I arrive/when I leave) to their reminders.
Fantastical 2 for Mac’s natural language parsing engine has been updated to be even more friendly and flexible. The parsing engine now understands expressive repeating events such as third Thursday of every month, every weekend, last weekday of the month, and more. Plus, users can now add alerts by ending their natural language input with phrases such as “remind me tomorrow at 3PM”, “alert 1 hour before”, or “alarm 3PM.”
Fantastical 2 for Mac is fully localized in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and for the first time ever, Japanese. Users can enter their events and reminders in their preferred language and Fantastical 2 will automagically detect the entered language, regardless of the system’s language setting. OS X Dictation also makes it easy to quickly create events or reminders by speaking a sentence.
Fantastical 2 for Mac is available now for a limited-time launch sale price of US$39.99 from Apple’s Mac App Store or directly from the Flexibits Store. The standard price will be US$49.99. The program requires OS X Yosemite 10.10 or later to install and run.
If you’ve tried Fantastical 2 and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.
Via Flexibits
One reply on “Fantastical 2 now available, offers redesigned interface, new features”
I’m a visual person in most areas of my life — that is, I remember a lot of stuff by where it’s located and like visual clues. When Apple changed the Calendar app in, I think, Mavericks so that the only day that ever had any visual clue was “Today”, it drove me nuts. I expected that when I used Cmd-Shift-T to go to a date that date would be highlighted and it wasn’t, it made me wonder if I was actually on that date. The only way to know was to go to the Day view. For me, that was a real pain. Nothing changed in Yosemite in that regard. So, when I downloaded the trial version of Fantastical 2, that was the very first thing I looked for and it’s there in the sidebar calendar. I would MUCH prefer to have the currently selected date highlighted in the main calendar, but at least there’s a way to know which date is currently selected.
I just read about Calendar Sets and that sounds like a very good idea — I just haven’t tried it, yet.
The events list in the sidebar is great. Another gripe I have about Apple’s Calendar is that even when I switch to the Week or Day view, the all day events list at the top is a fixed height and I have to scroll to see more events. The Fantastical events list in the sidebar shows all the events for the selected date and as many days after that as there is space.
Fantastical 2 imported all of my calendar’s from Apple’s Calendar without an issue, even retaining the colours that I had selected.
Otherwise, I don’t see a lot to recommend Fantastical 2 over Apple’s Calendar app. It retains the confusing continuous flow calendar but without Apple’s large font Month indicator in the main calendar. There is no year indicator in the main calendar.
Just like Apple’s Calendar, neither the input date format nor the Cmd-Shift-T format show my selected system date format. My system has a custom setting to be US but to show dates in the international format (i.e., dd-mm-yyyy, etc.). But both Fantastical 2 and Apple’s Calendar show mm-dd-yyyy which means I have to think about how I enter dates (and goodness, I certainly don’t want to think — actually, I don’t, I want to enter dates reflexively). In fairness to Fantastical, this is likely a Yosemite problem and not an app issue. However, Fantastical even shows the US format when I show an event’s details — not good.
I would rate Fantastical 2 as a mediocre improvement over Apple’s Calendar. It looks nice, Calendar Sets is potentially very helpful, I like seeing all events for a day without scrolling, and my visual side likes the visual indicator of the selected date (even if it is only in the sidebar calendar). However, it’s lack of utilizing the system date formats is a definite negative. I’ll have a very hard time coughing up even the introductory $39.99 for those few improvements and the one significant step backwards.