The ticker can be dragged down to access a month view and also a search field. This also - not entirely successfully - attempts to provide an overview of each day’s events, primarily through colored lozenges representing calendar types. At the top of the screen, you get a day ticker that enables you to quickly snap to specific days. It largely dispenses with multiple views, instead preferring you to access all your events from a single scrolling list. You can override system view settings.įantastical is all about focus. Natural-language input mostly works very well. On balance, we reckon it’s probably the best Calendar app on the iPhone, and certainly the top choice if you want something very familiar to use, but that’s more usable, useful and flexible than what Apple provides itself. But unlike Fantastical, this universal app means you don’t need to buy again if you own an iPad. Calendars 5 has no Apple Watch app, and barely acknowledges Notification Center, merely enabling you to create a new event. Attendees can easily be contacted, and tapping a location instantly gives you a full-screen map. (The location stuff tends to be flakier.) The event pages are also smartly designed, very clearly showing all the salient information for any given event. when we were planning a dinner), but asking for contact information while crafting the event makes up for any shortcomings. The natural-language input isn’t quite as smart as Fantastical’s (Calendars 5 was stumped by ‘next week’, for example, and sometimes needed to be told 7 p.m. These expanded details are duly added to the event. It also has a stab at deciphering any locations you include. While you’re tapping away, the app helpfully invites you to confirm which people you’re talking about, selecting from your contacts. Calendars 5 has a decent stab at natural-language input, meaning you type in an event as you’d think about it in your head: ‘Lunch with Andy on Friday at 1–3’. It is, however, slightly irksome to have to tap an expanding menu button to reach the buttons for accessing these views.Įvent input broadly impresses. These views feel messy, but they do offer a great means of scanning events over a long period of time. (A more typical week view is available in landscape.) The Month view ambitiously attempts to display up to five events for every visible day on your iPhone’s relatively small screen. The former chooses to display events in square blocks, and each day can be scrolled if there are too many events to fit on the screen. The Day view is almost identical to the one in Apple’s Calendar, but Week and Month views are markedly different. A ticker exists at the foot of the screen, providing fast access to nearby relevant dates (days of the week in List or Day view, or adjacent months in Year view). The result might not look as stylish as Apple’s effort, but it’s a lot more usable.įor the most part, this positivity extends to calendar navigation. Additionally, the bold text is easy to read, and the app utilises multiple lines well for invited contacts and locations.

These are connected to colored blobs at the left of the screen that denote the calendars the events belong to.

The main List view eschews ‘Jony Ive minimalism’ for a bunch of white event ‘tags’ on a grey background. This app is the most conventional of our three picks, although it still doesn’t look an awful lot like Apple’s app.

Calendars 5 vs fantastical