BEST OF 2020

App of the Year: Fantastical

A classic calendar transformed itself in 2020.

Fantastical - Calendar

Reminders & Todo List

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The versatile calendar and task manager Fantastical is our 2020 Mac App of the Year, but you could easily think of the designation as a lifetime-achievement award.

For nearly 10 years, Fantastical has been a reliably great productivity app for a simple reason: It helps you get more done in less time with less effort. Efficiency is baked into even the most basic features—create new events by describing them (“Yoga at 7:15 p.m. the third Thursday of every month”) or glance at your upcoming events with a click in the menu bar.

What’s more, Fantastical stepped up to the plate in a year when our calendar ruled our lives like never before and even the simplest chats had to be scheduled meetings. The latest version automatically detects any video-call appointments and provides a link so you can join them directly, no matter what service they’re hosted in.

Fantastical does the busywork of figuring out a meeting time that works for everyone.

Its calendar subscriptions keep you up to date on life outside of work, letting you see when the new episode of Ted Lasso drops or when Mars will be especially visible in the night sky.

Even more handy is a smart meeting scheduler that quickly surveys attendees to find a time that suits everyone—and lets folks confirm by just clicking a link (a feature that saved approximately 1 billion back-and-forths in 2020).

In 2020, the wonderful Fantastical showed how an old favorite could reinvent itself for a new age.