At a Glance

Expert’s Rating

Fantastical is the multiple award-winning calendar app with powerful features including an intuitive natural language parsing, a full calendar window with day, week, month, and year views, an ultra-quick access mini window, tasks, time zone support, and much, much more. Don't know about great, but. Installed Calendar 366, per what @Weaselboy posted in the Fantastical news thread.I find it OK. Some inconsistencies in UI (eg. One screen will show Events first then Reminders, others, flip-flopped; some screens Reminders are displayed in random order vs by time). Fantastic definition, conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; bizarre; grotesque: fantastic rock formations;fantastic designs. Fantastical is a synonym of fantastic. As adjectives the difference between fantastic and fantastical is that fantastic is existing in or constructed from fantasy; of or relating to fantasy; fanciful while fantastical is of or pertaining to fantasy. Fantastical's subscription model is the best showcase how not to do it. A subscription to use widgets:rolleyes: They lost most of their year-long-loyal paying customers, including me (who spent.

Our Verdict

Chances are, you use Mac OS X’s iCal calendaring program, the calendaring component of Microsoft’s Entourage or Outlook program, or an online calendar for your scheduling needs. But how often do you actually require the huge calendar view? If you’re at all like me, most of the times you open your calendar program, it’s to see what events are coming up in the next few days or to quickly create an appointment. And given the convoluted interfaces of these programs, “quickly” is often not that quick.

Over the past few years, I’ve covered a number of programs that aim to take the place of a full-blown calendar program for these types of tasks, including Today, FlexCal, MagiCal, and MenuCalendarClock. Each still works well, but the newest kid on the block, Fantastical ($15; Mac App Store link) aims to combine some of the best features of these applications, along with some impressive event-creation technology, in an attractive and easy-to-use package.

When running, Fantastical appears in your menu bar as a small calendar icon displaying, by default, the current date (providing a much-requested OS X feature on its own). Unfortunately, unlike MagiCal, you can’t force Fantastical’s icon to appear at the far-right-hand side of the menu bar. I hope the developer, Flexibits, includes this capability in a future update.

Click the Fantastical icon, and a beautiful calendar appears that shows the current month, with the current day circled. Dates with events—based on your chosen calendar program—display a small bullet, and upcoming events are listed below the calendar. Click an event to view its full details.

Fantastical works with any calendar you’ve set up in iCal, Entourage, or Outlook, including MobileMe, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar accounts. If you’re using iCal, iCal doesn’t even need to be running—Fantastical can communicate directly with CalDAV servers, which is a feature unique among similar utilities. Fantastical can also read from and write to calendars stored on your Mac; however, when using Outlook or Entourage, you’ll need to have that calendar program open, as Fantastical communicates with Outlook and Entourage using AppleScript. (Fantastical will automatically launch Outlook or Entourage if needed.)

Fantastical works with the excellent BusyCal, although with a couple limitations. The first is that new CalDAV events created in Fantastical won’t appear in BusyCal until BusyCal’s next scheduled sync, and vice versa—so there’s often a delay between the time you create or edit an event in one program and when that change appears in the other. Second, in order for Fantastical to “see” a new calendar, it must be added to, or created in, iCal—if you add a new calendar only to BusyCal, Fantastical won’t know it exists. The developers of Fantastical and BusyCal are working together to address these limitations.

(I tested Fantastical with MobileMe and Google calendars and with iCal and BusyCal.)

You can choose whether Fantastical’s upcoming-events list displays events for today; today and tomorrow; or the next 7, 14, or 31 days. Alternatively, you can choose to show the next five, 10, or 20 events, regardless of the time frame. If you have multiple calendars configured in your main calendar program, you can also choose which of those calendar’s events appear in Fantastical; events are color-coded to match their calendars.

You can, of course, browse to any date and click it to view that date’s events (along with however many subsequent events, or days’ worth of events, you’ve chosen). Alternatively, if you hover the cursor over a date, that day’s events are displayed in a tooltip. Fantastical’s search field lets you quickly find events that match your search string, displaying results in the events list, with the the closest upcoming event selected. I wish you could quickly jump to a specific month and year, but you’ll need to use the next- and previous-month buttons to browse instead.

Just as useful as Fantastical’s event display is that you can create new events without having to open your main calendar program. You can double-click a date to create a new event on that date, manually filling in the event’s details, but Fantastical’s standout feature is its natural-language event creation.

Click Fantastical’s icon, or press the new-event keyboard shortcut, and type (in English) a conversational description of the event; Fantastical parses your description to fill in the details accordingly. Press Return, and the new event is created, Fantastical closes, and you can get right back to work.

For example, if I type Macworld Staff Meeting Friday 10a SF office, Fantastical creates a new event with Macworld Staff Meeting as the subject, the upcoming Friday as the date, SF office as the location, and 10am to 11am as the time. (Events without an end time are assumed to last one hour; those without a time specified are assumed to be all-day events.) Vacation July 5-12 Maui creates an all-day event called Vacation, with the location as Maui, from July 5 through July 12. Fantastical deftly parses your descriptions, getting the details right the vast majority of the time. It even knows that “lunch” means noon.

A subtle but useful touch is Fantastical’s animation: As you type your event description, your letters and numbers float smoothly from the text-entry field to the appropriate fields in the event-details form. This makes for cute visuals, but it also lets you see exactly where Fantastical is getting each bit of information which, over time, helps you tailor your descriptions to Fantastical’s text-parsing logic.

If you include in your event description the name of an Address Book contact, Fantastical will let you add that person to the event’s invite list and, when the event is created, send them an invitation. (If a contact has multiple e-mail addresses, you’ll need to choose the address to which you want the invitation sent.) If you’re using Outlook, one limitation here is that you’ll need to manually confirm, from within Outlook, the sending of the invitations.

New events are created in your default calendar, although you can choose a different calendar for any event. You can even include the calendar name in your event description, letting Fantastical set the calendar for you, by preceding the calendar name with /—for example, Vacation July 5-12 Maui /personal.

Unfortunately, you can’t edit or delete an event from within Fantastical; you’ll need to open the event in your calendar program, which you can do by double-clicking the event in Fantastical. (Flexibits says event editing is coming in a future update.)

One other feature I’d like to see is the capability to “tear off” Fantastical’s window and leave it on your screen—Second Gear’s Today can remain on the screen to display your schedule and tasks, which is a useful option. You can can lock Fantastical so it stays open in its current location, but this usually leaves Fantastical blocking other windows.

Fantastical doesn’t include every feature of every other calendaring add-on, but it’s a great package that handles—with an attractive interface and some impressive options—most of the things you use your “big” calendar program to do. And it makes it much easier and more convenient to quickly create new events. I’ve been using Fantastical for a while now (I started during the program’s beta period) and the only time I actually open iCal or BusyCal—my calendar programs of choice—is when I’m trying to find a time for an event and I need to see a detailed view of my schedule.

Note: Fantastical’s $15 introductory price is good until June 1; the standard price has yet to be determined.

Updated 5/20/2011, 8:30am, to clarify price and BusyCal-compatibility improvements.

Fantastical

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The all new Fantastical 3 offers a huge number of new features and a whole host of new actions for Shortcuts. These make doing some actions that would otherwise require you to fine tune the native calendar shortcuts much easier, and easier to integrate into your workflows. Fantastical supports both calendar events and reminders/ tasks, so I’ll cover each of these.

Fantastical Tasks

Calendar Actions

Fantastical is primarily a calendar app, so it would be a surprise if it didn’t offer a good selection of calendar-based actions for Shortcuts! Fortunately, what we have here are both useful, as well as easy to use.

Create from Input

Natural language input parsing in Fantastical is one of the app’s most beloved features for good reason — it just works. This action allows you to create a task or an event with that same text. You can build it into a Shortcut that splits a whole list of dates and parses them into events (for example, if you’re emailed a list of shifts or upcoming deadlines and want to put them in your calendar).

The action outputs a Fantastical Calendar event, which allows you to extract useful information from the event you’ve just created. So if you had a shortcut to parse a list of deadlines to add them to your calendar, and then wanted to add them as tasks in Things with a link to the calendar event – you could do it¹!

Show Calendar

The Show Calendar action shows you all the upcoming events on a specific calendar. You can even specify the date that it should do this from, which is really nice if you’re building a Shortcut to guide you through a weekly review at work, show you upcoming events for every day next week as well, and even ask you if there’s anything you need to remember for that day. This is a pretty big help! ²

Show Schedule

Most of us check our schedule every day, sometimes even multiple times a day. This action is designed to give you a nice overview of your remaining events or tasks in a day and gives you a cute image if there’s nothing left. I’ve put an NFC tag on my desk so that when I get to work I can tap my phone to it as I put down my bag and see what’s on the agenda for the day.

Upcoming Item

Much like Show Schedule, this action is really useful when combined with an automation trigger. It simply shows you the next event on your calendar with how long you have left before it starts.

Task Actions

Fantastical 3 has made it simpler than ever to manage your tasks inside the app — it even supports Todoist! Therefore, it’s no surprise that they have added actions for Shortcuts to help you see your reminders.

Show List

I hate having to add a location reminder to everything in my grocery list to get a reminder for what I want at the grocery store. I can use this action to show me my list for the store with an automation based on my location — and it’s really simple to set up. The Show List action allows you to see all the incomplete tasks in a list, add the action, select your list, and that’s it.

Overdue tasks

While we all hate letting things become overdue, it happens. This action is designed to help you see these tasks across all of your lists so you can get caught up easily.

Show in Fantastical

This action works with both tasks and events, or even health samples. The idea is that you can easily jump to any date in Fantastical. If you give it anything that has a date, even a song, it will open the app on that date. This is really handy if, like me, you have all day events for all of your travel in your calendar. You can use an action to pull those in, present it as a list, and then jump straight to the trip in question in your preferred calendar app³.

You might well see some other actions than the ones detailed here, and that’s because Fantastical offers suggestions to Shortcuts based on how you use your device. This is really smart and allows actions like Show Schedule for Today to be an action that is even faster to use than Show Schedule and specifying Today as your input.

One important thing to note is that the actions Apple built into Shortcuts are still there — these are Add Event via Fantastical and Add Reminder via Fantastical — and probably show at the top of the list of actions under Apps → Fantastical. I’d recommend avoiding these. You can tell which they are by tapping ⓘ and then checking the Result. If it says (Text) The input, then this is an old action and won’t offer the advantages you’ll see from the new Shortcut actions we’ve covered!

Fantastic Beasts

We have more useful workflow examples right here.

Wait. There’s a Bonus….

Custom Productivity Templates

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We’ll show you…

• How to create and save custom page templates in GoodNotes.
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Plus, we also have included a couple of our custom productivity templates for you to get started with. These templates are right out of our popular productivity course.

Fantastical App

The custom templates and the guide are available for FREE to our email subscriber community. And you can get it right now. By joining the Sweet Setup community you’ll also get access to our other guides, early previews to big new reviews and workflow articles we are working on, weekly roundups of our best content, and more.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald

1. You can download Parse Clipboard To Calendar And Things here. ↩

2. You can download Work Weekly Review here. ↩

3. You can download Open Trip in Fantastical here. ↩