So I hastily bought Fantastical based off recommendations from every tech podcast and everyone who uses calendar apps. Also I wanted the Siri Shortcuts integration.
Upon purchasing I was finding the features and to my surprise there is no calendar view that shows at a glance titles of events that are happening over the month. All there is is colored dots representing the type of event. I can’t imagine how this is useful.
For instance, I have a class starting in December but I’m not sure the day it starts. School events are notated in red. So I have to go through December and look at the week view in every place there is a red dot?
Having a basic month view with event titles has been a feature of literally every calendar app I have tried and I just can’t believe that Fantastical doesn’t have this basic feature.
Is there a reason why they chose this design decision? And how do you utilize its limited month view?
This is my primary gripe about Fantasical. The reality is, I use a different calendar app when I need to see my month view. Every update I hope they change this, but I’ve been a user for a long time and I’m not sure that will happen. Even with this limitation, Fantasical is still my go-to 90% of the time. But I agree, their month view is quite irritating.
Thank you so much for saying that, I felt like I was the only one that had this gripe. With all the love that this app gets and with it’s price tag to be missing this basic functionality just seems incredible.
So far entering data in Fantastical is a breeze, but looking at that data is just a terrible experience. I took it for granted that Fantastical would have this feature so next time I have to do more research before I put money down based on people’s recommendations,
The thing is, one person’s “basic functionality” is another person’s “I don’t care”.
I use Fantastical as my primary calendar, and my major gripe—what I consider to be conspicuously missing basic functionality—is the absence of “time to leave” notifications and “shared calendar change” notifications. I rely on both of these very heavily and Fantastical offers neither. On iOS I just let Calendar do all the notifications, and don’t use Fantastical’s notifications.
I sympathize with your struggle, I have my own! But it’s always good to keep in mind that not everyone has the same needs! Now, of course that doesn’t mean we can’t complain about it! But we should be wary of blaming a developer for omitting something “obvious” just because it’s obvious to us. But, nevertheless every now and then I send a note to Flexibits to register my frustration!
I have definitely noticed there are two kinds of people when it comes to calendaring — Those that need the big picture, and those that want the hour by hour updates. But given that nearly every other calendar out there has a good month view, it does seem a clearing omission that Fantasical still does not. And sure, better notifications would be a bonus, but that’s not something I miss.
I agree. I sent a note to Flexibits. I will be pining away for this every few months. For now I am using Calendars 5 to look at my calendar and using Fantastical as just an invisible action in my Siri Shortcuts.
I bought Fantastical because it would pass an address to Waze. But a recent update of something (either Waze or iOS) has Waze automatically seeing Calendar appointments. I think I’ll just delete Fantastical now that I don’t need it. Apple’s Calendar is otherwise fine for me.
I’m with @Scottisloud. Today I use a Rube Goldberg system of Fantastical, Apple Calendar, and Google Calendar, all tied to my Gmail account.
Since all three share the same info, this allows me to use Fantastical for input, when I need the convenience of its natural language feature, and Google Calendar for viewing. And alerts from my Apple Calendar - which include time to leave.
I use Apple Calendar only when necessary to feed a calendar into my Google Account. (Some apps will feed events to Apple Calendar only.) I use Readdle Calendars 5 on iOS because of the excellent Day view, and it also has natural language input (which I don’t use), but I don’t know how it compares to Fantastical’s. On iOS I’ll occasionally open Google’s own Calendar app because I find useful its 3-day view.
I bought Fantastical, but I just wasn’t crazy about its views, and I don’t like that scrolling feature everyone else seems to love on the iPhone.
For quick-and-dirty views of Google Calendar on my Mac I use CalendarPro. I also own Kiwi For Gmail, which has its own GC page/option, but I almost never look at it; CalendarPro is fine for my needs.
I purchased Fantastical as everyone thought it was the best, but I just didn’t get along with it well. I ended up buying Informant 5 and it seems to work the way I want and need a calendar app to do. Interestingly enough, I never see anyone recommending it. I can’t even remember where I heard about it!
