fantastical shortcut mac for different calendar

It’s almost unbelievable how well this thing works and how deeply it improves the way I can add events using nothing but English. But writing it in Fantastical? It creates a new calendar event with “Meet with Cody” as the title, “tomorrow” as the relative date, “Apple Store, Viterbo” as the desired location, and 5 PM to 6 PM as the timeframe.

Adding this sentence to a new iCal event does nothing. Example: Meet with Cody tomorrow at Apple Store, Viterbo 5 PM to 6 PM. Fantastical uses a natural language parser that will let you write down events in plain English, and have the app correctly recognize the input in various fields. User interface, however, is functional to Fantastical: it’s minimal because Fantastical wants to be simple to use, and it’s gorgeous for as much as it’s powerful inside. I know the very own purpose of a calendar app isn’t that of letting you stare at it, but when compared to this or this you’ll notice the difference. First off, it’s elegant, minimal and unobtrusive, yet beautiful to look at. Indeed, Fantastical does some things the default Mac calendar client can’t even imagine. And it shows when testing Fantastical: Flexibits believes in its new app so much they wrote “your Mac’s calendar will never be the same again” on the teaser website. As usual, though, I believe there’s plenty of room for alternatives if you’re willing to take a risk and believe in your product. Like in Twitter clients, developing a third-party calendar isn’t an easy task: you have to make sure it will work with all those calendar protocols out there, but most of all you have to know you’ve got something on your hands that will stand out from the crowd – especially when Apple itself ships a full-featured iCal.app with OS X that does its job just fine for most users, and doesn’t require an additional purchase.

How do you improve the default OS X calendar application? How do you set out to create an alternative that can be appealing to power users, and accessible for calendar novices at the same time? While beta testing Fantastical, an upcoming Mac app by Flexibits, I thought these were the questions the developers tried to answer with their latest creation.

Fantastical shortcut mac for different calendar