I have been a happy and loyal Fantastical user for many years, most notably on iOS. When it was first released, Fantastical’s use of natural language support was a huge time saver when inputting appointments, as opposed to the multi-modal, picker-intensive default calendar application. Especially on the phone, I love Fantastical’s list view, as well as its introduction, prior to iOS, of a dark mode.
Fantastical’s monthly calendar view on iPad, however, left me wanting more. It is no secret to anyone that calendars, whether hanging on your fridge or serving as a blotter on your desk, are typically presented in a monthly view. This is not an artifact of a bygone era; people benefit from seeing a big picture when planning. Digital calendars are superior to their paper forebears in being able to present more focused day and week views, but a spatial, monthly view is still a crucial feature of any calendar.
Fantastical’s presentation on iPad looks sharp, but it doesn’t work. You can see a month at a time, but the only data afforded you in this view is whether there are events on your calendar for a day or not, indicated by a dot specifically colored to match the calendar to which the event is associated. You have to look at a side bar to see the event specifics for each day. This, to my mind, is cognitively inefficient. And of that resource, there’s only so much to go around.
Month View
Readdle’s Calendars 5, by contrast, presents a more familiar, if less stylish, monthly view that shows the actual content of your events and appointments. On iPad, this makes sense; a 12.9″ Pro is as large as that of a MacBook Adorable; in a device that is ostensibly a laptop replacement, you want to be able to see the month laid out before you. Along the bottom of the screen, Calendars presents a row with each of the months of the year; you can quickly scrub from month to month without swiping horizontally–but that gesture works, too.
Month View (Calendars 5)
Month View (Apple’s Calendar)
Week and Day View
Calendars also has Day, Week, and Year views. Day view provides a list of your appointments and events for the day, with a horizontal line through the current time. A list view occupies the left 40% of the screen, which allows you to see today’s obligations with greater detail, as well as scroll through past and future events. Along the bottom of the screen is a horizontal strip of–you guessed it–dates, allowing you to scrub (or tap) from day to day. Week view presents columns for each day of the week, with events stacked up along horizontally aligned hour-long intervals. The horizontal controls show you the date range corresponding to the next and previous weeks, which is a useful bit of data.
One note about week view: you can configure the start day of each week (the default is today–the current day-which I found confusing). I conceive of a week starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday, so the far left column, in a week view, should be Sunday, and the far right should be Saturday. Always.
Making the Most of Both Planes
Calendars allows you to use a menu, arranged horizontally, along the bottom of each view–day, week, month, and year–to advance to the next logical block of time. For example, in month view, Calendars presents a row with each of the months of the year; you can quickly move from month to month without swiping horizontally–but that works, too. In Day view, you can likewise scrub ahead using the menu, or swipe on the screen. And so with Month and Year views.
Tasks
For those users who don’t need a fully featured task manger like OmniFocus or Things, Calendars offers a task management feature akin to Apple’s own Reminders. Like Things, Calendars offers an Inbox for unfiled tasks, a Today collection for starred tasks, and upcoming and completed collections; you can star a task and it will show on the Today collection. Starring an item makes it appear on the date in Calendar view as well. Like Reminders and Things, Calendars supports lists to separate tasks by projects. There’s no means by which to tag or otherwise group tasks by context, so Getting Things Done adherents would likely pass on Calendars’ version of task management. For more casual users, however, it’s a nice addition.
Tasks (Calendars 5)
Things (left) and Calendars 5 (right)
What about iPhone?
Calendars is a universal app, so you can run it on both iPad and iPhone. The very thing that I like about Calendars on iPad–its use of the larger screen–is what I dislike on the phone version. Day and list views are separate on the iPhone; list view looks similar to its analog as part of day view on iPad, but its use of otherwise nonfunctional chrome lessens information density. Fantastical, by contrast, shows a tighter list.
In week view, Calendars aligns the days of the week vertically, with appointments running left to right. In this view, long event titles are line-wrapped, irrespective of the conventions of print. This is hard to read. Rotating even a large phone, such as the iPhone 11 Pro Max, yields a more standard, horizontally oriented calendar; however, the use of vertical space is such that you can’t see very much of your week at a glance.
In month view, truncated event titles look poor on the smaller screen, so while you might be able to tell when you have appointments, you never get a full view. In a sense, it’s a worse experience than what makes Fantastical’s display silly on iPad: where Fantastical fails to make use of the iPad’s screen real estate, Calendars is too ambitious on the small screen.
This is not unlike the disparate approaches Apple has taken to the two iOS-based versions of Calendar that comes installed on every iPhone or iPad. On iPad, day, week, and month views offer significantly different and information-rich displays of your calendar data. On the phone, you have information-rich list and day views, no week view, and a useless month view. This last mode gives you no more information than a blank paper calendar.
Touch Controls Only
For as much as Calendars takes advantage of the iPad’s screen size, it ignores the robust keyboard support Apple has baked into the OS. Holding down the command key in Calendars reveals that there are, in fact, no keyboard shortcuts. Commands–1 through 3, for example, should work as they do in Apple’s own Calendars, toggling the user between views. Similarly, Command-N should create a new event or task, depending upon which mode you’re using.
Natural Language
The innovation that Calendars (and Fanstastical) brought to iOS and the Mac was natural language input. Instead of typing an event title, and then tapping into a modal box with a date and time picker, users could type “Brakes with Patrick at noon on Wednesday” and the app would interpret what you meant. Calendars presents an entry field that shows you all of the information you are trying to get the software to parse, so that you can be sure that it records your intended entry. Fantastical and Calendar both do this, but Fantastical uses a more visual representation, zooming to the spatial location on a virtual calendar. Apple’s application doesn’t interpret your input on iOS or iPad OS (although it does on the Mac).
Misc
Calendars 5 is free to use unless you don’t use iOS’s system-level support for email and calendar accounts. It offers in-app purchases for multiple calendar support as well as a subscription to a number of calendars you might be interested in.
My frustrations with Fantastical on iPad led me to look again at Readdle’s Calendars; I had used it before and am an enthusiastic Spark user on the Mac and iOS. I was immediately pleased with the information-rich weekly and monthly displays missing from Fantastical, and the horizontal controls that allow you to scrub between each mode’s relevant units of time are delightful. It’s a great iPad calendar client, expanding upon the simple yet functional execution of Apple’s own iPad app. Although it tries to solve the problem of information density on the smaller screen, Readdle’s Calendars 5 doesn’t transfer its utility to iPhone.
In the end, I’d recommend Calendars 5 on iPad, and Fantastical on the Mac and iPhone.
Calendars 5
