I cut the cord last week from Google Workspace - I literally left 30k emails behind, and my calendar (although I had a backup on my iPad). I’m getting used to Hey Calendar the past two weeks. It’s interesting. It forces me to slow down and really thing what I am planning, instead of dumping all my tasks on it. I would say that the only thing that is missing is a task list specific to Hey - their other product Basecamp (which we use) is good, but that is for projects. I need a personal task list too. Other than that it has great features and the interface is very cool. I especially like how they created a timeline of the day from left to right. It better shows me if I am staying up to date with my appointments.

So let’s get the bad out of the way first, which makes this app 3* at best —- you have to use the desktop version to manually add in all the calendars you are using right now, and the app won’t let you update those calendars. There also doesn’t appear to be any “import” functionality. Thus it’s awkward to get started unless you don’t have much in a single calendar, in which case, why bother?OK, so let’s say you go through the pain of adding in all the calendars you’re used to and are looking for something to manage the Tetris display that is your daily life. Here, it’s OK. There’s some novel enhancements —- Habits being one that may be interesting —- and the timeline looks better. Will give this some time to play with, but without being able to easily import / edit existing calendars, I can’t see this being the go-to app.

I have been a fan of Hey email for a while and was hoping for something like this from the Basecamp team. It feels like a huge step in the right direction of making calendar apps more useful for how humans think and plan and review.I hope they’ll keep at it. Seems like a difficult market and a difficult solution on a strategic and technical level — then again, the Basecamp team have shown they are willing to put in the work.

The Hey team in their marketing talk about their inspiration from paper calendars for this new app. And in many ways this app is about as useful as a paper. - there is no import function, so you have to hand transcribe every event from other calendars if you want the full functionality of a native event versus a subscribed instance (same if I was transitioning to paper) - there is no integration with mapping software, so the location info of events is essentially useless. You cannot search for addresses by typing the name of a place. And once inputting a full address it is not clickable or able to be copied. (Same as writing it on paper)- there is no ability to share the calendar outside of Hey. I love Hey, but no one else I know uses it. Definitely not my partner, so now we have unsynced calendars. (Same if we had our own paper calendars)- there is no widget functionality. I can’t get any quick views of my calendar on my home or lock screens and have to open the app every time I’m curious what’s next. (Same as opening a day planner) I get that this is a brand new app, and much of the design and direction are absolutely wonderful. But this lack of key functionality makes it very difficult to consider switching.