Fantastical - Calendar App Reviews

Like many others, I used Fantastical on iPhones and my iPad before I added it to the MacOS. This calendar is superior to any others I’ve used. I’m glad I bought the version for my Mac. It fully integrates all of the calendars into one. Having it on my Mac means I can update it from any of my devices. I also want others to know how responsive and helpful the support group is. The answers are to the point. I had to ask the same question twice because I had accidentally deleted the first answer. That was embarrassing for me, but I knew I still needed the help. I was treated courteously, promptly and given the answer again. I highly recommend purchasing this app. It’s worth it.

I really like this app, but the location pick list fails so often when I get in the car to go, that it wrecks the experience. The cause seems to be that the lookup uses Apple Maps, and I use either Waze or Google Maps. I have tested this extensively and the problem is only going from the pick list to Waze/Google. If I plug an address in from a calendar that uses a non-Apple Maps lookup, it works every time with Apple Maps as well as Google or Waze. If Apple Maps were reliable, I would grudgingly use it, but it isn’t. This means that when I add a location to an appointment, I have to get the address from some other source. If I forget, I often have to stop the car and do a manual lookup in Waze. This unreasonably ruins an otherwise great experience. The ability to fill into a particular calendar using the slash is a terrific idea and makes the plain english aspect really useful. Everything about it is well considered and efficient. It was a hard pill to swallow to pay the $50, but it is absolutely the only calendar app I have found that I’m willing to use to replace Sunrise. Now, if they can just change the location issue, I could give it 5 stars.

Fantastical is just an excellent calendar app. The integration with Reminders is great. Did I mention that natural language input is brilliant?! I can work with multiple Exchange, Google, iCloud calendars, designating events, reminders, frequency, times, recurrence, alerts and notes all with a simple sentence or two and without every pulling my hands from the keyboard. That includes launching the app and entering multiple events and reminders. This app has completely changed my workflow for the better and has allowed me to be far more organized than I could ever seem to be with the default OS X Reminders and Calendar apps. If you think it’s insane to pay $50 for a calendar app, you’re wrong. At least, if you demand more from your calendar than what OS X Calendar provides. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s minimal and the responsiveness of their support staff and the thoroughness of their support documentation has really impressed me.

Well I can’t say I needed Fantastical because I use BusyCal and it does everything I need. But on sale for $40 I splurged, and I’m glad I did for one main reason: I really enjoy using this app. It’s beautifully designed and integrates both calendar events and tasks from Reminders, which are my two requirements. Working inside Fantastical is a pleasure, from navigating calendars to managing entries. I still use BusyCal and switch back and forth with Fantastical; the two apps sync perfectly so I can make changes in either one. But it’s good to have Fantastical in my organizational toolbox. I think the pretty design has a calming effect on me.

Two things I love about this calendar: 1. The menubar icon. It is very handy to have the calendar always at the ready without having to switch applications. It’s great to quickly check your schedule or add an event or reminder when that unexpected phone call comes in. 2. The ability to see reminders in my calendar. There are other calendars that do this, but the combination of the menu bar icon makes this a winner for me. These two features along with the fact that it integrates seamlessly with the OS calendar and reminder system made this calendar worth the purchase. The fact that my family also can use it made the price reasonable.

This app was working flawlesly last year before my laptop was updated to El Capitan. I received immediate support but those fixes failed to help the problem. Looking forward to getting it back working.

If you rely on your calendar, you need this app. It works very well as a full-screen space, incidentally.

After using the Apple Calendar app forever, I decided to give fantastical a try. My first test bed was on my iPhone. It’s a great app, really taking "visual ques" from Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines to heart. Visually it’s what you would imagine a modern app to be - clean, focused, uncluttered and “to the point” - no fluff wanted, none needed. As an extension of my day to day the iOS version tied with the OS X version on my Mac are inseparable and fully transparent - that’s the selling point for me. An app that seamlessly keeps my day organized and logical across multiple devices -what else can you ask for? Its task integration can use a slight polishing up in way of functionality, but works well in the present state. One super nice addition to this app would be a “notes” section independent of the overall grid. An integration of a pseudo-project management notes section would make life just that much nicer, and fully integrated. As is this app is worth it’s price, you will not want another calendar app, ever.

I think this could be the best Calendar out there, however I really need my Calendar to be able to print along with my reminders. I know you say you listen to your users but I have a feeling this one won’t ever happen. I feel like for $50.00 I should be able to print.

This app is certainly priced at a premium. But it’s also so wonderful. It’s the app that Apple should have designed in the first place. The contextuallly aware text engine is great, the quick-key launch with window hover is awesome, and it’s lightning fast. The devs are super responsive; they’re on Twitter and email, always looking to help and fix problems. I’m happy to give ‘em my hard earned cash.

Seriously people? 1 and 2 star reviews for a premier calendar like FAN 2? Let’s say you are travelling to St Martin for a vacation. You have a choice, stay at a 5 star hotel or you can stay at a 3 star hotel. Same exact location, but a far better vacation and experience if you stay at the 5 star versus the 3 star hotel. Sure, you pay more for the 5 star, probably a lot more, but it’s worth the extra money. Why cheapmout on something important like your vacation. Same with Fantastical 2. The built in cal is just fine for mostly everyone. But for me, I want the 5 star hotel treatment when it comes to my cal; so I’ll pay for that service. Try using the natural language feature in both. More often than not, if I input, “Meeting at 9am Thursday at the Peabody House” in the built in cal, “The Peabody House” shows up in the event description, not the location of the event. In FAN 2, I have never, not once, not had the location place show in the location field. And since I also have Fantastical on my iPhone, I simply click the location pin and boom, I’m sent on my way with directions. With the built in cal, I need to edit the event on CAL and hope it can find where I’m going. A needless waste of my time. My time is important to me. In a day where taking 30 seconds to watch a video of whatever, is a chore (and probably not going to happen during the work day), every minute counts. Fantastical 2 helps me with that. It’s a solid program. The little thingy in the menu bar, is gold. Pure gold Jerry. Sure, you can have the app in the task bar at the bottom, but visually, it works far better having it at the top menubar. Clock on that thingy up there and boom, you have access to your cal. Having the ability to scroll through all of your events. Gold again. Listen, I paid $120 on Onmi-focus because that program on my Mac and my iPhone keeps me organized day to day, minute to minute. Is spending 32 cents a day worth it to me to stay orgnaized? You bet. I’d pay (whatever the cost) on anything to make me more productive, to make my day more efficient, and to make my life easier. Fantastical 2 is, now anyways, $39.99. But who really pays $39.99? What person in their right mind pays full price for an iTunes card these days? These cards are always on sale. If you are smart, and when the cards are either 20% or 25% off, you stock up. I buy the 25% cards, lots of them. If you pay full price, I assume you have money to burn and your priorties are elsewhere. Probably playing Madden 2016. So the $39.99 for FAN 2 was essentially $29.99 for me since I only buy cards at 25% off. That $120 I paid for Omnifocus, not quite, I only paid $97.00. How much do you “really" value your time? I value mine greatly. The stock cal is just fine for most. Not for me, when the days aren’t long enough and working longer hours is not the answer. I will pay the extra dollars for a top-notch cal program. And FAN 2 is just that program. And guess what, if FAN 3 came out on JAN 1, 2017, I’d buy that version if it made me more productive.

It’s easy to pick an IDE, game, audio or video editor as your favorite app, but in terms of sheer usefulness and time spent, I think Fantastical does indeed take the cake for me. I have it both on Mac and iPhone and it absolutely keeps me on track by letting me quickly and accurately add my appointments with natural language—using dictation on the iPhone version is especially great in this regard. If you need something more robust than the built-in Calendar app or online versions of Google Calendar, I’d highly recommend checking Fantastical out. It’s great.

I love Fantastical. Especially since they made it so I could see the to-dos / reminders in the calendar itself, it became even more perfect. That really helps with scheduling. A few suggestions though: 1. Why does the to-do span an hour or so in the calendar weekly view - sometimes it is just a checklist item and sometimes a 10 minute thing. Maybe you can add a functionality where I can either specify a default time duration for any to-do, or a specific time duration for each to-do. That way it won’t take up so much space on the weekly view. 2. Printing: this is a major pain point. I like to print out my monthly calendar to put up on my cork board (and it would be awesome to print it out with the reminders / to-dos). Perhaps you could add this functionality where I can print out a specific calendar set in both weekly and monthly view. 3. This one is my curiosity: why do I have to keep the app open all the time for it to sync? Why can’t it background sync? Overall — the app is VERY expensive — Buying the app for the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad is Super-Duper expensive. So having spent a LOT of $$s on this, one wonders why some basic funcitonality (Printing) is absent. And yes, while so many of the features are AWESOME, some are highly desired and I hope you guys put them in. Keep up the good work. May the Force be with you.

Still my favorite calendar app, both on the Mac and my iPhone.

The human interface of Fantastical is fantastic. Its easy to create new events, and toggle calendars on and off. But several details are a deal breaker. Primarily, it doesn’t save the new events I create! I can create events in Calendar and they’ll appear in Fantastical, but the events I create in Fantastical don’t appear in either program, not even itself. I am connected to my iCloud calendars according to the program, but I cannot save events to them. Easy creation is not much good if the events aren’t saved. Second, sending comments like that to Flexibits is apparently not possible. There is no ‘contact us’ on their webpage. The help manual is located on their page, and its very short and simple. Meaning there’s no clues how to fix problems, not even a wiki of solutions for problems found by the user community. In short, I have a piece of software that doesn’t work for the most basic function, creating and saving events, and no way to know how to change it, if that is possible. So its back to Calendar for me, and will probably be for you as well. Suggestion: wait for another round of bug fixes.

Here are a few of the things I love about this app: - Natural language. - Calendar sets. - Keyboard shortcut for mini window - Ability to be default calendar Calendar sets is pretty great. You can set the specific calendars you want and they can even show up based on location (see Preferences in app). Keyboard shortcut --> Natural language is killer. I do ⌥ + ⇧ + spacebar and then just type the event, hit ⏎ and bam! New event created. Its so fast and seemless. A+ for this app. For minor questions, I thank the developer for being so active via Twitter (@flexibits) and email. Much love to Michael Simmons (@macguitar) for all the support throughout the years.

As a quick update to my review in the early stage of my use: I still think very highly of this product. The shortcomings of becoming a great tool for business still exist. It really needs to support plug-ins for the common place tools like Salesforce.com, full Exchange integration and a GoToMeeting or, ugh again WebEx would be great. What i found over the weekend that really “chaps my hide” is: After paying for the App for Mac they want to ding you for iPads and iPhone/Watch seperately. Now, a 20 buck gee whiz calendar app that support all Apple devices one carries around daily. But a $40 App to support your Apple ecosystem is too much for the pretty colors. My additional 2 cents. Greg T. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I’ve only been using the app for a couple of days. Primairly to integrate my Macbook Pro in a sea of Windows & Google App users at my company. Outlook can’t cut it for Google App intregration for anything but mail…calendars, tasks and note…forget it! Some of the critical shortcomings of this App for the Corporate/Enterprise/Business user is/are: Full Exchange integration, intro with SalesForce.com, GoToMeeting and (ugh) dare I say WebEx. Salesforce.com and GTM are must haves, points on which to argue I suppose. But using the GTM plug-in for meeting scheduling and interaction/logging of emails for Salesforce.com would be killer. In the end…this is slick looking App which affords some flexibilty/interactivity with Exchange and Google calendar but for the business community…needs some work. My 2 cents. Greg T.

One major bug: Dates in the week view are often not correct unless the app is restarted. Please fix asap. Thanks!

I’ll admit, I was a bit hesitant about paying as much for this app because I wasn’t sure I would like it but I took the plunge (and later realized there’s a free trial version)! What I’ve been waiting for is a good To Do system or task list that can handle my complex task demands that also shows up on my calendar. This. Fits. Perfectly. I was a little concerned because by default the tasks w/ a due date and time show up ON the calendar, and I wanted my task list to be on the side of my calendar only. I found the setting to take that off and now I have a FANTASTIC calendar with my complex To Do’s/Reminders on the side. I love it. Worth every penny. I have shared Reminders with other people, so Fantastical syncs great with my Reminders tasks. I have multiple calendar accounts and multiple shared calendars I keep up with along with 4 different task lists…Fantastical handles it with ease. I have had no issues. Great job, guys!

FantastiCAL 2 has made me extremely more productive! Buy it! This app has so many excellent, innovative, useful and easy-to-use features. It’s well worth the price. While I use all the features ‘CALENDAR SETS’ is one of my favorite and most useful. FantastiCAL 2 lets you establish and colorize all your individual calendars. “Calendar Sets,” let’s you display one or several calendars in one calendar. These “Calendar Sets” display only the information you need and keeps your personal or unneeded information hidden. One group I established is “ACCOUNTS.” It is used to pay bills. It comprises data from four calendars: ‘DEPOSITS, ‘OWED, ‘EFTs’ and ‘PAID. Now, a bill payment session has been reduced in time by at least 70%. You can always display a single calendar if you want. Another group I established is “OFFICE.” It displays only the calendars I use during work and hides all other personal or unneeded calendars. This and so many other features have increased my productivity, timeliness, and accomplishments. Get it and explore. It offers a great trial period with all features. You’ll accomplish more and feel great with the low price. Gregory Clark Dallas, Texas