My Review of Fantastical



What was the problem I was trying to solve. The problem I was trying to solve was how to easily add events to a calendar. Until recently my choices were either to have the calendar open and sitting in my dock or open iCal every time I needed to add a new events. Neither is very practical, leaving the calendar open  just eats up CPU and having to wait for it to open up every time I wanted to add an event was also not very practical. It took for ever to open and adding events was not very intuitive. So what was the solution. For me it was an application on the Mac called Fantastical. It is available thru the Mac App Store or through the Flexibits Web site for $19.95. There is a 14 day trial through the Web site. Once it is downloaded and installed it  sits in your menu bar, ready to use when needed. It works with iCal, Microsoft’s Entourage and Outlook. The only way for it too work with Google or the Yahoo calendar you have to add them to iCal.

When you are ready to use it just click on the icon or use a keyboard shortcut. (You can set the short cut under preferences.) Then just start typing the event as you would if you were writing it down or speaking it, in other words naturally. Fantastical uses a natural parsing language to fill in the event as if you are entering it in the calendar of your choice. If you can set up automatic alarms for both timed and all day events under preferences. You can have Fantastical show you the events for that day, next two days, a week or for 31 days. You can also set it to view by events instead of days. I know $20.00 seems like a lot, but believe me it is well worth it. If you are on Windows or Linux do you have a similar application, if so what is it.