Fantastical Calendar 4+

Good, not great

Fantastical is a nice calendar app, definitely better than the built in offerings. Not so much so I’d pay 40 quid a year for it though. I did try out the openings feature which I thought might have been worth the money but it seems to do half the job it ought to. It cuts your day up into slots of the size you specify but that seems to suppose you want to have multiple meetings of the same type every day. For example, I’m trying to set up a single 4 hour meet up in an 8 hour window. That only allows the option of two times. Whereas if I was scheduling that myself I could suggest the meet up start anytime between the first slot and 4 hours from the end. Perhaps the use case is only for people who make business meetings of exactly 1 hour slots but I already have teams for that and would like something to help organise my social life.

Developer Response ,

Please contact us so that we can log your feedback and make improvements in the future: https://flexibits.com/contact

A Whisper of Perfection

What makes this app above and beyond for me is the slickness. It’s a dream to use and maximises the functionality of the iPhone using swipe, portrait and landscape (rotated giving the full view of the week ahead). It’s a super-smooth user experience and interfaces with natural language parsing which makes the app enticing to use despite its feature-rich disposition. In dark mode, these features just pop. I know what the weather is and what the time is thanks to the constantly updated red timeline across the day.
I like to regularly attach links and attachments to meetings, and the app has all the tools to allow me or others (via Openings) to schedule a meeting via Google Services including adding Meet links. The ability to create templates from an event and or share tasks with the Reminders app adds powerful geofenced reminder options.
I won’t say there is no learning curve with it as there is a good deal of settings but I find that I enjoy tweaking these over time to improve my flows.
When an app becomes this intuitive, it has matured into something else; Fantastical has reached the ‘where would I be without this?’ app status in my everyday productivity app survival kit.
And the icing on the cake is tech support. The turnaround times with subscription priority support are pretty breathtaking. Worth every penny/cent.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your review! We are glad that you enjoy the app as much as we do and truly appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with both Fantastical and our support staff.

Great app

I, like everyone else, am not a fan of these endless subscriptions. I think people are going to have enough and start becoming super picky about what they are willing to pay our money for. But, that may be a good thing. For apps to survive in their subscription based revenue stream they are going to have to constantly provide value.

For me, this is doing that, even though at first I wasn’t sure it would. I work with clients in short appointments all the time. I have two businesses with this set up, one of which has room resources that can be booked by other people. This is all handled in Gsuite accounts. I have a personal calendar and shared family calendars in iCloud. I have reminders in iCloud for personal and Todoist for work. Everything is pulled together into one place and it is handled well.

For me two features stand out and make it worth the money. Templates for appointments that make it quick and easy to create multiple entries and not leave clients waiting for me to faff around. Secondly, a quick view switcher. You can create calendar sets that show you just the bits you want at any given time. Neither of these mean you can do something you couldn’t in any other app, but if streamlining and speeding up the workflow has value to you, this app is worth the money.