![]() “We went back and made Fantastical 2 for iPhone. Simmons said he “loved iOS 7 from first sight” and decided to put Fantastical for iPad on hold to focus on a redesign and retooling of Fantastical for iPhone, the company’s flagship product.įor an iOS 7 redesign, “we needed to rethink Fantastical, to rethink the DayTicker,” Simmons told me. ![]() ![]() Work on the iPad version of Fantastical was interrupted last June when iOS 7 was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. “The DayTicker, the way it came out, people saw that this calendar app was different,” Simmons explained. The company felt this was a superior interface to the built-in iPhone calendar and, when combined with the natural language parser, made for a strong app. Users can see their upcoming schedule and events, days of the week, and more. The company felt like the built-in calendar app was pretty good, and they wanted to come up with something really unique.įor the iPhone - and now the iPad - the developers came up with the DayTicker - a at-a-glance 5-day view of the next week or so. “We’re not making an app just to make money,” and so the iPhone app trailed the Mac version by more than a year. “We didn’t have an idea in our heads” for an iPhone version of Fantastical, Simmons said. The app started as a simple calendar parsing tool, “you would enter an event in natural language and boom, it would create the event appropriately.”įrom there, the developers created the Mac version of Fantastical, a deceptively powerful menulet - an app located in the Mac’s menu bar next to the clock - that includes the parser and a quick look at upcoming appointments. “I had a busy schedule and it was always a pain to click and click and go up and down and type,” he explained. Instead, Fantastical has a natural language parser that allows users to add events using normal English (or French, German, Italian or Spanish) sentences.įor example, instead of creating a calendar event and typing “Lunch with Al” for a title, then moving to the location field to type “The Palace Restaurant”, then manually setting start and end times, as well as the date - an overly complicated process - Fantastical has users type “Lunch with Al at The Palace at noon on Thursday.” The app then figures out what the user means, displaying changes on the fly so the user can be sure they are entering the event properly, and adds it to the calendar.įlexibits co-founder Michael Simmons says the parser eliminates the complicated song-and-dance required to make an appointment in a traditional calendar app. The developer, Flexibits, believes that the biggest problem with the standard calendar on iOS is the amount of time it takes to actually enter all the metadata for a new event: start time, end time, location, date - depending on how complicated the event is, as many as 11 different criteria need to be manually selected, and that’s a lot of taps. Now, it's finally coming to the iPad.įantastical is a replacement app for the standard calendar that comes with the iPad. Fantastical, one of the best iPhone calendar apps, is now on the iPadįantastical is one of the most popular third-party iPhone calendar apps, hitting number one on the App Store best-seller list several times.
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