Fantastical 2 is one of them. More than anything, it wants to make calendar input and overview as easy as possible. So even someone as lazy as me can get into it. They do it by taking the obvious dud points and reinventing them. There’s a whole new way to create events, the search actually works and so does the daily view. And that’s just the start. Below you’ll find 5 reasons why Fantastical 2 for iPhone is totally worth your five dollars.
1. Natural Language Input
This was the thing that made so many of us Fantastical fanatics. One of the most tedious parts of scheduling an event is the process of it all. Writing the details, selecting the time, the date, and then the place. All this using different kinds of menus and interactions. Using Fantastical you can just write a sentence and the app will extract the details from it. So you can just say “Lunch with Abhijeet at 2 PM on Thursday at Amici, Khan Market” and it will pull in all the relevant data and create the event, even recognizing the location.
2. Intuitive Search
Another great thing about Fantastical is the search. Searching for a keyword displays all the related calendar events in chronological order.
3. The DayTicker
The DayTicker is a custom UI created by Fantastical. Fantastical is divided in two parts. The top shows the days – you can switch between 5 day and month view by swiping up. The bottom half shows the events for a particular day. Now, these two models are interconnected. So when you swipe up on the calendar or select a different day, the event “timeline” will move as well. It’s the same with the timeline. Scroll up and down and see the calendar view shift accordingly. This is to make sure that no matter how many events you have, you’re never lost.
4. Integration with Reminders
If you’re an Apple Reminders app user and you use it to set time-based reminders, they will show up in Fantastical automatically. They will be integrated into your calendar just like any other event. And of course, you can use Fantastical to set reminders as well. The app has a different setting for event-based reminders altogether.
5. Notification Center Widget and Extension Support
With iOS 8, Fantastical was updated with a Notification Center widget. Here you can see an overview of the month. Any day that has events shows a dot underneath. You can switch between months as well. The iOS 8 extension lets you create events from anywhere, even from Safari.
What’s Your Fantasy Calendar App?
Were the above features enough to convince you to start using Fantastical 2? What is your current system like? Let us know in the comments below.
