As a long time customer, we respect your decision to not purchase our subscription and will handle this like the professionals we are. We value your business and our reputation.
( some time passes )
Application popup window appears “Buy our subscription! This feature is paywalled! In your face!”
This new Sweet Setup review seems to be more aligned with what MPU members have been posting in this topic:
Thanks for the link. I managed to get through the typos in the intro to the meat, which I think reads like a struggle between their natural desire to enthuse over the shiny new thing and a recognition that there’s a real issue.
I think it’s fair but rather clumsily done
The main aspect is to get the user’s mail addresses for two reasons:
They fully knew that only a small subset of their users will subscribe. But they also fully knew that a much larger number uses the Fantastical complication on their Watch. Forcing those users to sign up for the account creates an intrinsic motivation to go through the tedious process of creating yet another account.
I don’t know where I read the case study (probably on medium) of a small start-up’s founder, who reported on seeing a huge increase of new users, once they switched from requiring to create an account with an email based login before you could even use the app to allowing to explore the app first, but then making you create an account, if you want to store the settings/progress made during your initial exploration phase. You lose a lot of potential new users, if you force them to create an account upfront.
It’s the same with Fantastical. You have to create an account to subscribe. If that step is already eradicated you might be more likely to just hit subscribe later on.
I’m on iOS 13 and Mojave with my Mac. Ever since I upgraded to iOS 13 I lost the ability to see reminders on my Mac. I’m still running Fantastical 2 on all devices. What I’m saying is, your reminders not working in High Sierra or Mojave is on Apple, not Fantastical.
As a workaround, I’m using reminders on my iOS devices and Things app, which has not been affected by the iOS 13 upgrade. It’s a pain, but it’s working for now until I upgrade my Mac.
Since I made the mistake of upgrading my Reminders when I went to iOS 13, my 2 Macs on High Sierra can’t access them. My workaround was to go to Busycal (which is available on Setapp). It has the option of using reminders or its own Inbox scheme which seamlessly syncs between all the Mac and iOS devices. Good integration with its calendar or you can use a panel to the right of the active calendar that lists the to-dos. I’m quite happy with it.
I don’t understand why BusyCal isn’t mentioned here more frequently. It was the calendar darling before Fantastical, and I think it’s still a very good app. Much better than the stock app. Custom fonts. Natural language entry. There’s even an Alfred workflow to enter events within Alfred. I like it as much as any calendar app I’ve used, including Fantastical.
Honestly, to me BusyCal has always looked a bit antiquated and too “corporate”. Sometimes apps become successful just because they bring a bit of a fresh take on things, even if it mainly is visually.
At some point many users got convinced to invest the $64.97 for the entire calendar suite of Fantastical for all three platforms. The $4.99 for BusyCal for iOS are a steal, but adding another $49.99 for the macOS version is steep.
All of a sudden you have spent $120 for calendar tools in the last years.
I’d argue that a lower price for BusyCal on macOS would make more people switch, potentially including myself. (Yes, I know it is part of setapp, however, this is yet another subscription.)
I used BusyCal & BusyContacts extensively when I was working and found them a powerful combination. I especially liked how BusyContacts would bring up a list of all meetings and emails associated with a particular contact.
One of my last big projects lasted about 15 months and involved working with a couple dozen people from four different companies. BC/BCs was about the only way I was able to keep up with all the players.
I think I own BusyCal outright (although that may be an older version). But I use the Setapp version, so it was easy to return to it. Setapp really is one subscription I don’t have qualms about. (There are others, but for me, Setapp is a no-brained for Ulysses and BusyCal alone.)
Probably true for a lot of people. I don’t spend that much time actually IN my Calendar app. I just want it to steadily work along in the background and let me know when I need to be somewhere or do something. (Which is why, although I like Fantastical, it made zero sense for me to pay a subscription even though I’ve bought the app in the past.)
For those interested in avoiding the subscription to Fantastical but like the calendar set feature, BusyCal has something similar:
Calendar Groups
You can arrange calendars into groups, which enable you to show or hide multiple calendars at once. Grouped calendars must all exist on the same service (such as Local, iCloud, LAN, and CalDAV), but you can use smart filters to create calendar sets that span different services.
To create a group for calendars on any service, first select a calendar from that service. Then choose File > New Calendar Group, type a name for the calendar, and press Return. Drag calendars onto the group name to add them to the group; drag them out to remove them. To show or hide all the calendars in the group, select or deselect the group checkbox.
You can rearrange calendar groups in the sidebar by dragging them, rename them by double-clicking them, or delete them by selecting them and pressing ⌘-Delete or by Control-clicking them and choosing Delete from the contextual menu.
Actually the developer of Chronicle started out with the “Free updates for life” and without any word instituted a paid upgrade 2 version ago.
Only speaking for myself, I never even used the full feature set of Fantastical 2. I primarily used it because I liked the interface and it was a nice cross-platform alternative to the iOS/macOS native calendar app.
But as I am not a power user who needs or will benefit from most of these improvements, it is simply not worth a $40/year subscription for my use case.
For those who subscribed to Fantastical…
Did you change your account setup? My assumption is that when you subscribe… you just sign in with your Flexibits account and all your calendars migrate to every device you sign into. (Similar to how Readdle does it with Spark)
My only reason for considering subscription is because of that. It’s been frustrating to make sure each account is manually added to each device so that all the calendars I need are visible.
Yes, I know that this is probably a #firstworldproblem. But things should be simplified for faster automation.
I did — for precisely that reason.
For Fantastical subscribers…is there any reason to add your calendar accounts to iOS directly anymore?
Or just add them now to Fantastical direct with the subscription?
I just subscribed to Fantastical to test out the calendar set features and see if I really need it. I created 2 additional calendar sets on my Mac, signed into all my devices. None of my calendar sets synced over through the Flexibits account. Not a happy camper. Already reached out to Tech Support. Has anyone else experienced this?
I’ve had a lot of PEBKAC errors facilitated by the confusing layers/parallel syncing structures. There’re a lot of little preferences that need to be aligned in order for it to work as expected. E.g., I thought my watch wasn’t syncing its calendar set, but for some reason I had to open Fantastical on iOS to trigger the sync. At some point my calendar sets were on iOS, and then my subscription lapsed, and they disappeared but it took a while.
I’d bet it’s not strictly a syncing issue but something more surface-level.
This morning I realized my watch app still wasn’t syncing. So I enrolled all of my calendars in the Fantastical account and now it seems to work better than ever.
A bit frustrating that the difference in functionality forced the switch, but I have no qualms with giving Fantastical access to my calendars, luckily.