HEY Calendar 4+

If you are familiar with products from 37signals (creator of Hey email) you know they improve their products with time, and have thoughtful iterations/updates. Take the time to learn all the features, use it for a while, and you might just be surprised you prefer the “Hey way” of doing things. If not, there are plenty of other SaaS products doing the same thing as every other SaaS product.

Hey email is amazing so I expected the calendar to be as well. But it is not. It is bug ridden and feature poor.

It is very pretty, but unusable for real life in its current form. Some examples:

1. Syncing external calendars has been broken since release. Imperative for the people who use Siri to add to their calendar.

2. There is no month/year view in the app. I have to open my iPhone calendar if I want to answer simple questions like “what day of the week is August 10th?”

3. There is no search so the calendar cannot answer more simple questions like “when is my doctor appointment?”

4. The thing that passes for a “to do” function cuts off the text at 25 characters and there is no way to see the rest.

5. The “to do” thing has no way to set dates, times, reminders etc. you just have to keep looking at it to hope you don’t miss anything.

6. Recurring reminders are at the 2010 stage where you can only recur daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Weekdays, or every other week. I think every other calendar I’ve used in the past decade has the ability to recur on specific month days (like the third Tuesday each month, or the first Sunday in May).

If future updates address these issues I will change my rating.

Like email I used to hate looking at my Apple calendar. This is a fresh and useful remix on the function of a calendar.