This probably doesn’t exist, but does anyone know of an iOS app that provides countdowns using calendar data?
There are a lot of garbage countdown apps out there, so it has been hard to find this manually.
My dream is to be able to put my phone in front of me as a nice-looking realtime countdown to the end of the current event and then a countdown to the next event on a given calendar.
Since posting, I’ve discovered Fantastical’s Live Activities. (They needed some configuration in the settings before they appeared.) They almost work, except that they just display the begin and end time of the event, with no countdown.
Ryan, try https://prettyprogress.app/
It has calendar and reminders sync as well, I’m not sure about it having live activities or not though. I got it for free during indie app Santa giveaways, haven’t dived into it yet though, but it looks super sleek.
It doesn’t use Calendar data, but I love Up Ahead for IOS. It includes recurring things like Birthdays and also one offs.
Pretty Progress is so close! It doesn’t seem to countdown to the end of events, though, does it? Maybe I will write the dev(s) about this.
Just having a play around with Pretty Progress (there is a 7 day free trial) and you are correct, it doesn’t count down to the end of the meeting.
Perhaps, as a workaround until the devs get back to you, you could run a Shortcut automation that adds a new dummy 5 minute duration “End of Event Name” event for the appropriate calendar events at the end time of the event. You could set it to run daily and delete all the “End of” events from the previous day as well as adding them for the current day. If you already have events that butt up against each other, this could be on a separate calendar - meaning you don’t have to see them in your calendar view.
The downside of this is that you would have the “End of” event showing in the Pretty Progress widget throughout the day, reducing the number of actual events that you can see, although the large widget seems to have up to 8 events displayed.
Hope this helps.
Interesting idea. I could do this with Rules so that it only creates the “end of” event at the beginning of these blocks of time:
Not played around with the Rules app – looks quite interesting. Another app to try!
The other thing I have just found with Pretty Progress is that it does not seem to be possible to select a specific calendar for a particular widget; if you synchronise multiple calendars, all the events from all the calendars appear on the same Upcoming queue – I can’t see a way to have a widget for work events/meetings and a a separate widget for personal events without manually adding the events.
