Fantastical 2 for iPhone review: Calendar app gets more fantastic for iOS 7
Thanks to its intuitive interface and outstanding natural-language event-creation capabilities, the original version of Fantastical for the iPhone has been the rare static icon on my otherwise continually evolving Home screen. Put simply, it’s a much better calendar than Calendar—at least for my needs.
But much like Apple’s own iOS 6-era apps, the original Fantastical’s font choices, muted colors, and skeumorphic details—such as subtle “stitching” along the top of the virtual calendar—look dated on a phone running iOS 7. So it only makes sense that Flexibits, the maker of Fantastical, has been working on a new appearance for the app. But the company has also been developing new features that have required significant changes under the hood.
The result is Fantastical 2 for iPhone (App Store link), an app that’s undeniably a complete redesign, but that’s also immediately familiar to anyone who’s used the original version. Fantastical 2 requires iOS 7 and costs $5, though Flexibits is offering it for a limited time at the introductory price of $3. (The original Fantastical runs perfectly well in iOS 7, so if you don’t want to forgo a coffee or two to buy Fantastical 2, you can continue to use the old version.)
Familiar yet new
When you launch Fantastical 2 for the first time, you’re asked to allow it to access your calendars and reminders—a standard procedure in iOS 7. (Any calendar you’ve configured in iOS 7’s Settings app should work with Fantastical.) You’re then greeted with the same basic view you’d see in Fantastical 1: A red title bar indicating the current month and year, with buttons for accessing settings and creating a new event. Below that is a white calendar showing, by default, the upcoming five days—as the first-launch tutorial helpfully explains, you just swipe down an inch or so to toggle between this view and a monthly calendar. (Scroll a little less, and you get a search field for searching all your calendars by event title, location, invitees, or all.) Taking up the rest of the screen is the Day Ticker, a scrolling, chronological list of the events in your calendar(s), with past events dimmed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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