This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

Posts tagged with "calendar"

Fantastical 1.1 Brings Editing, Deleting, Notes and Full iCloud Support

With the release of the iPhone 4S and Siri, Apple is putting much focus on natural language input and the concept of “personal assistant”, a technology the company first explored almost two decades ago, which was impossible to implement until today. With faster processing power, persistent Internet connections and better voice recognition, Siri is perhaps the most impressive feature of the iPhone 4S and one that Apple will undoubtedly promote heavily in the next months.

On the Mac, of course, the situation is quite different. Whilst one of the new functionalities of Siri on the iPhone is being able to create and schedule calendar events, on OS X we’ve had calendar apps with natural language support for quite some time, such as Fantastical and QuickCal. And today Fantastical, which I first reviewed here, has received a major update that adds two of the most requested features: event editing and deleting.

With Fantastical 1.1, you can edit and delete events without jumping to your main calendar app, like iCal. Now, instead of having to launch iCal to make edits to something you entered through Fantastical, you can simply double-click on an event to start modifying it in a separate popup window. The interface is the same you already know for calendar events; you can also delete an event and add notes, which will be synced across all your devices and, if configured, iCloud. Option-double-clicking an event still opens it in your favorite calendar app – remember, Fantastical supports BusyCal as well – and anchor mode can now be toggled with a keyboard shortcut.

Another big improvement in Fantastical 1.1 is full iCloud support. The app already supported iCloud calendars, but now that Apple’s service is public the app has been specifically optimized to take advantage of its new push technology for calendars and events. And because Fantastical features direct CalDAV integration, everything you enter in the app will be immediately synced back to the cloud, without having to open iCal (or letting it run open in the background). In my tests, iCloud integration has been extremely reliable, allowing me to enter an event (or make edits) in Fantastical and see the results appear in real-time on iCloud.com and all my iOS devices.

Fantastical was already a great app, and now that it’s gained editing, deleting and notes it really can be used as a calendar replacement, which thanks to natural language input will also act as your personal “calendar assistant”. Fantastical is available at $19.99 on the Mac App Store.

iOS 5: Improvements In Safari, Camera, Photos, Mail, Calendar, Music & Video

Today’s release of iOS 5 sees the inclusion of new apps such as Reminders, significant upgrades to existing apps such as the integration of iMessage in Messages and the introduction of iCloud, which is set to change the way we use our iOS devices. Yet amidst all these significant changes to the iOS platform, Apple hasn’t forgotten about the apps that have existed since day 1 of the first iPhone.

The Safari, Mail, Camera, Calendar, Music and Video apps have all received updates in iOS 5 and the updates range from addressing common complaints, tweaking the user interfaces, adding iCloud support to adding features that improve productivity and usability. Be sure to jump through the break to view the entire overview of changes to these apps.

Read more

QuickCal 3.0 Gets Redesigned UI and BusyCal Support

Back in May I reviewed QuickCal for Mac, an iCal add-on that, through a very straightforward interface, allowed you to create new events in iCal using “natural language input”. With a combination of keyboard shortcuts and direct iCal integration, QuickCal let you write down events in plain English (example: Lunch with Cody tomorrow at Italian restaurant), and have them automatically formatted as new entries in iCal, which would then sync them to a MobileMe or online service of choice. Alternatively, QuickCal also featured native Google Calendar support, so events didn’t have to go through iCal first to be synced online. With a clean menubar list of upcoming events, support for to-dos and smart reminders, I was quite impressed by QuickCal as an iCal add-on for desktop users.

With the 3.0 update released today, QuickCal adds a completely redesigned UI, a new dynamic dock icon, and a series of improvements throughout the interface. As with the previous version, QuickCal can be invoked by pressing a keyboard shortcut (mine is Control+Shift+Q), which will open a floating panel (think OmniFocus’ quick entry/Alfred/NotifyMe) to start writing down a future event. Focus is immediately placed on the text cursor; the new QuickCal entry box design is nice to look at, and it retains the underlying simplicity of the older versions. As you type, text is automatically formatted to reflect an event’s data points like date, location, and duration. For instance, “Meet with Chris at Apple Store, Viterbo tomorrow from 5 to 6” will result in an event called “Meet with Cris”, with location, date and duration fields automatically filled in. This hasn’t changed from the old QuickCal.

QuickCal 3.0 has a beautiful dock icon with a dynamic date on it (like iCal), although unfortunately, due to Apple’s rules with menubar apps and Lion, you’ll have to manually drag it from Launchpad or the Applications folder onto your dock if you want to see it. Once it’s there, you’ll be able to click on it to open the quick entry panel, and drop text on it as well. If you don’t want to use QuickCal’s own quick entry box, you can make its natural language input work with popular application launchers such as Alfred and LaunchBar.

Other features of QuickCal 2.0 have been maintained and refined in this 3.0 release. The app can still create to-dos in a specific calendar with the “todo” prefix – this works nicely with iCal’s Reminders in Lion. QuickCal also provides a summary of upcoming events and to-dos in the menubar, and you can play around with the app’s preferences to tweak sorting options, days to show, and completed events. You can set a default calendar for new events and to-dos, enable Google Calendar sync in the second tab of the Preferences, and, as with version 2.0, activate automatic conflict resolution, so the app will turn red if you’re creating an event that’s overlapping an existing one.

One of my favorite features of QuickCal 2.0 has been ported over to 3.0, and that’s Smart Reminders. With this functionality, you can set the app to automatically apply certain alarms for events that are a day, week, or month away. This way you’ll always have a reminder available and different depending on the kind of event you’re assigning it to.

QuickCal 3.0 comes with native BusyCal support, but I haven’t been able to test this. I’ve only tested the app with MobileMe and iCloud calendars, and I’ve noticed QuickCal still isn’t completely independent from Apple’s iCal in that it requires iCal to be open to sync events to the cloud. With iCal closed but QuickCal running, new events will be saved in QuickCal, but they’ll only be synced after you launch iCal. Another app with natural language input for events, Fantastical, comes at a higher price on the App Store ($14.99), but it syncs events immediately to the cloud thanks to native CalDAV sync support.

QuickCal 3.0 is a simple and effective companion for iCal, now with a nicer UI. I prefer to call the app an add-on, rather than a mini-calendar replacement, as it requires iCal to be open to sync events to iCloud/MobileMe, and it can’t live on its own unless you’re a Google Calendar user. Natural language input is certainly more reliable than iCal’s in Lion, and the interface is unobtrusive enough to be there to assist you, but get out of the way as you don’t need it. If you’re an iCal user and you’re looking for a quicker way to enter events in plain English, QuickCal is only $2.99 on the App Store (a free 14-day trial is available on QuickCal’s website).
Read more

Agenda 2.0 Gets Native, Elegant iPad Version

Back in June I reviewed App Savvy’s Agenda, an elegant and intuitive calendar app for the iPhone that was “powered by gestures”. Unlike Apple’s recent experimentations in UI design with interfaces resembling their real-life counterparts (Address Book, Lion’s iCal, the iPad’s Calendar), Agenda wanted to be an app that looked like your old “paper calendar”, in a way that wouldn’t feel awkward or “over-designed” on the iPhone’s screen. That made Agenda an easy-to-use application with the focus on beautiful typography, navigation, and “one hand usage”. Agenda can be used with single swipes to the left or right to switch between monthly, weekly, and daily views.

With a free 2.0 update released today, Agenda becomes a Universal app that runs natively on the iPad. I’ve been able to beta test it in the past weeks, and I’m impressed by how Agenda made the leap from the iPhone to the bigger screen of the iPad. Everything in Agenda 2.0 – navigation, views, event creation – benefits from the added pixels and updated interface, which takes advantage of the iPad’s landscape orientation to beautifully lay out year, month, week and day views with the same attention to simplicity and typography seen in version 1.0. On the iPad, you start in a day view with a sidebar, and scheduled events on the right. The bottom toolbar contains buttons to snap back to “today” in the sidebar’s scrollable list, jump to a specific day, or change the view to day/week/month/year. The day view’s sidebar automatically updates the translucent top header as you scroll back to previous months, and a search bar along the top lets you look up single events in your calendar. Agenda supports all calendar protocols integrated with iOS, and calendars are automatically imported from Apple’s Calendar app (you can choose which ones to enable, and the app works with no issues with iCloud).

Tapping on events in the day view will reveal a popover with additional details, whilst swiping vertically in this section will navigate between days. Similarly, tapping on days in the sidebar will scroll the right panel automatically. At the top of day view, Agenda displays a mini-calendar for the current month; tapping on it will bring you to the month view, which is fairly standard but gets the job done. Events can be given colored dots for the calendar they’ve been assigned to, and today is highlighted in red. Again, scrolling vertically in this view will automatically advance to the next months, and update the header at the top.

Agenda for iPad also offers a year view, which has to be scrolled horizontally, and provides some basic “heat map” functionality in that thanks to colored dots you can see at a glance which months are the busiest. Year view displays six months at a time – a clever choice that allows each panel to have bigger fonts for months and days. Tapping on a day in year view will jump back to day view.

My favorite feature of Agenda 2.0, however, is the week view on the iPad. See, when I use a calendar application, I like to know what’s going on this week. Week view allows me to instantly see my schedule for the week, and I love how Saturdays and Sundays (my non-work days) are smaller than regular week days.

I spoke to App Savvy’s Ken Yarmosh about Agenda 2.0, and he told me that, in a small way, the Mac influenced the design of Agenda for iPad. As I mentioned above, the iPad’s bigger screen makes for a more comfortable calendar experience and, personally, I think Agenda would be great as an alternative to iCal on my desktop. Agenda works with Apple’s standard EventKit framework for event creation, and the app is already running smoothly on iOS 5. I also asked Ken about the design decisions behind Agenda for iPad: unlike several calendar apps on the App Store, Agenda only works in landscape mode. Ken explained that, while designing the app for a different form factor, they had to look at how a regular calendar is used in real life, and found out that most “sizes” of a paper calendar are closer to the iPad’s landscape mode. I agree with Ken when he says that portrait views in calendar apps for the iPad are usually difficult to use and navigate. More importantly though, he confirmed my general feeling of “less swiping, more tapping” on the iPad version of Agenda – in designing a native experience for the iPad (and not a simple “port” of the iPhone experience) Ken and his team correctly assumed that the iPad implies different usage scenarios than the iPhone, and being forced to constantly swipe on the tablet’s large screen can be tiresome.

The new Agenda comes with a few more fixes and minor changes for the iPhone version, too. Agenda 2.0 is a delightful way to manage your calendars on the iPad – and app that focuses on content and an elegant presentation of events, weeks, and months. Agenda is currently on sale at $0.99, and you shouldn’t miss it.

Fantastical Adds Lion Support, And We’re Giving Away 10 Codes

Fantastical is a calendar assistant that works with Apple’s iCal and the popular third-party BusyCal software, allowing you to quickly creates event in your default system calendar with plain English. Thanks to a built-in natural language parser, Fantastical lets you write down something like “Get a new MacBook Air tomorrow at Apple Store at 5 PM”, and see the sentence becoming a new event with all the necessary fields already filled in your calendar. And because Fantastical directly plugs into calendar accounts configured on your Mac, you won’t need to enter your information again.

Fantastical 1.0.3, released today, adds full Lion compatibility and a new Lion-only feature that allows you to swipe with two fingers to move between months in the calendar. The animation is really nice, and reminds me of Safari’s new feature for navigating webpages with a two-finger swipe on Lion. Among various bug fixes, Fantastical also adds a new color menubar icon preference, a last-selected calendar option, and several parsing engine fixes.

You can read our initial review of Fantastical here, and buy the app from the Mac App Store. However, the Flexibits developers have been kind enough to offer 10 promo codes to celebrate the next major release of OS X with MacStories readers, so if you’re interested in the giveaway jump after the break for the full details of how to enter. Read more

Fantastical Adds BusyCal Support

Fantastical is a calendar utility by Flexibits which we’ve reviewed back in May and have been using since then as a companion to Apple’s built-in calendar application for the Mac. Fantastical, in fact, isn’t a full-featured calendar app – rather, it’s a “calendar assistant” that enables users to quickly add a new entry to all kinds of supported calendar protocols (including Google Calendar and Entourage) with a natural language input system. Instead of interacting with menus and checkboxes to set up a new meeting at a specific location, Fantastical lets you write down things like “Lunch with Cody tomorrow at Cafeteria from 1 PM to 3 PM” and have a new event created in your default calendar. And because Fantastical has direct access to these calendars, you can forget about leaving iCal open and just use Fantastical’s (beautiful) window from the menubar.

A new version of Fantastical was released today and, alongside improvements to event creation, parsing engine and date handling, it sports brand new BusyCal integration to create events directly into the popular third-party calendar for OS X. BusyCal is a calendar and to-do list manager for Mac geared towards power users with features such as Bonjour and LAN sync, multi-user editing, list view and various security features. With Fantastical 1.0.2, events can do directly into BusyCal without going through iCal first (though the devs note calendars still must be added to iCal). Version 1.0.2 also brings a new shortcut to bring an invitee pop-up for contacts recognized in your Address Book, and arrow keys integration to switch between calendar weeks.

Fantastical is simple and powerful at the same time, with a gorgeous user interface design that makes it very intuitive to add events to your calendars (and calendar apps) with a few keystrokes. You can download Fantastical at $19.99 on the App Store.

Agenda: An Elegant Calendar App Powered By Gestures

If all developers were to follow Apple’s recent paradigms when it comes to designing applications for the average iOS and OS X user, we’d end up having tons of different apps using the same faux leather / paper / linen / notebook interface elements. Take a look at the Address Book and Calendar apps on Lion, or the recent introduction of Reminders on iOS 5: as Apple’s OSes move forward, the trend in UI design seems to be that of creating software that resembles old, real-life counterparts people are accustomed to. And while you can argue this started back in 2007 with the Notes and Calculator apps for iPhone OS, there’s no doubt the launch of the iPad last year and the upcoming Lion added fuel to the fire with their skeuomorphic interfaces.

Agenda, a new app by Ken Yarmosh of Savvy Apps, looks like your old paper calendar but, luckily for us, adds modern interaction schemes and ideas that help revitalizing the old concept of month sheets, notes, and calendars in general. Rather than mimicking a calendar but resorting to the usual menus and navigation buttons to get around monthly views, days, and events, Agenda enables you to swipe horizontally on screen to go back (and open) any view. For example, the app starts in a beautiful and elegant view that lets you see an entire year worth of events; with a swipe to the left, the app slides to the current month. With another swipe, the monthly view becomes a weekly one, with a list of your upcoming events; another swipe, and you can open the current day of the week. Swipe again, and you’re brought to a single-event view of what you have to do at a specific time of the day. Obviously, all these actions can be activated with regular taps, too: tap on a specific month, and Agenda will open it with its slide animation. Same applies for days in the monthly, or weekly views. However, it’s very clear the developer put the focus on the ease of use of gestures, rather than normal taps: swiping to move between views is intuitive and fun, whereas swiping vertically will allow you to navigate between months, and days of the week in the sections provided by Agenda. It almost feels like Windows Phone 7’s UI principles of swiping between views have been ported to a native iPhone application, without the Metro interface of course. Once again: you can get around Agenda’s interface by simply tapping on screen, but there’s no denying this app was built with gestures in mind and the possibility of swiping to get to the view you need.

As far as adding new events goes, Agenda relies on the standard iOS calendar functionalities to lay out the event creation menu and integration with calendars already configured on your iPhone. Agenda can access any MobileMe (even iCloud for iOS 5 users), Exchange or Google calendar set up on your device, and adding new events uses Apple’s default window to assign a title, location, time, invitees, and so forth.

Overall, Agenda is a nice complement to Apple’s default calendar solution for iPhone in the way it keeps things minimal, letting you focus on seeing what you have to do and what’s upcoming, rather than supercharging calendars with additional functionalities most users won’t ever need. Agenda is clean, easy to use, and powered by a great gesturing system that makes using the app incredibly simple and intuitive. Get it here at $2.99.

Some Early Signs Of iCloud Web Apps Found

Details of iCloud, particularly over any potential web apps, have remained murky at best since Steve Jobs introduced the service at WWDC last week. Yesterday Joshua Topolsky of This Is My Next obtained what seemed to be a confirmation that web apps would not be offered with iCloud as they were with MobileMe:

Let’s be clear about what happens when iCloud goes live – according to what was described on stage at the event, and what I’ve confirmed with Apple PR –the service will effectively replace the current web offerings of MobileMe. That means that when the cutoff date of June 30, 2012 comes around for users, the web-based email client, calendar, contacts app, and other components of the web suite will cease to exist.

This drew a sceptical response from many, a post by John Gruber is representative of that scepticism, and today MacRumors seems to have found that Apple is actually porting iCloud to at least some of the MobileMe web apps. One of their readers sent themselves a Calendar invitation in iOS 5 and received a link to the iCloud.com domain. The above image illustrates what was linked to – and identical page to the current MobileMe invitations system (visually at least) except that was on the iCloud.com domain and had some iCloud branding at the bottom of the page.

It seems reasonable that Apple is working on at least some level of web support for the iCloud components but as usual they won’t confirm anything that they aren’t ready to talk about. If you wanted some more convincing of the reader’s screenshot jump over to this iCloud.com link and see for yourself.

[Via MacRumors]

Update: Well-sourced Apple journalist Jim Dalrymple at The Loop says iCloud will have a web interface, with Apple saving some interesting tidbits for iCloud’s public launch this Fall:

As for Josh’s Apple PR confirmation. The only thing I can think of is that there was some kind of misunderstanding. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber says Topolsky is making a “bad assumption.” That sounds about right to me.

Of this, I am sure — Apple will have a Web-based interface for iCloud. In fact, I expect an even cooler interface than the latest updates we saw with MobileMe calendar and email.

 

Patent Hints At Apple’s Traffic Service for Calendar Alerts

When Apple posted the location tracking Q&A to address the questions raised after two researchers discovered iOS was keeping a database of cell towers and WiFi hotspots iPhones and iPads used in the past stored unencrypted on a user’s computer, the company also revealed that, besides crowd-sourced WiFi hotspot and cell tower data, they were also collecting crowed-sourced traffic data to build an improved traffic service to launch in the next couple of years. Much speculation led to believe Apple was finalizing work on its own maps service after the acquisition of poly9 and Placebase, though a report from last week and a tidbit from Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt confirmed the upcoming iOS 5, which will be unveiled on Monday, will keep using Google Maps.

Whilst Apple’s mapping technology and traffic service seem to be in the works for a future version of iOS, perhaps iOS 6 in 2012, a new patent uncovered by AppleInsider today gives us a glimpse at how Apple could use traffic data, GPS signal and the Calendar application to build a service that keeps users informed on appointments and meetings and how long it would take to get there, with real-time information. The patent, entitled “Dynamic Alerts for Calendar Events”, was filed in 2009 and published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently. According to the application, Apple is envisioning a system where an iPhone can send a calendar alert based on location and time required to get to a specific location; by analyzing upcoming events and appointments, the operating system would be able to look at the location, consider external factors such as weather and traffic, and calculate how much time it would take to get to the destination. The user would be alerted with a popup on screen, which in the patent design shows “map” and “routes” options as the system would also provide a way to find the best route based on road conditions, traffic, and so forth.

Location-based alerts and scheduled reminders are currently possible in a variety of iOS applications – however, a centralized system developed by Apple would rely on years of crowd-sourced data collection to bring extensive information and, perhaps, accurate predictions on traffic and road conditions. Apple is expected to preview iOS 5 at the WWDC keynote on June 6, though such traffic service won’t likely find its way in the new OS.