Fanatical Fantastical users rejoice! The app, which makes adding appointments to your calendar as easy as clicking a button on top of your Mac menu bar and typing “Eat pork with Alex at 5pm on Wednesday,” has completely revamped its scheduling system and now supports complex requests (“Eat pork with Alex every Tuesday”) and reminders (“Remind me to eat pork with Alex when I get home.”) It also sports an improved at-a-glance system that allows you to see all your appointments in a nicely redesigned window.
“When we started Fantastical we wanted to fix calendars,” said creator Michael Simmons. “Fantastical 2 is an effort to fix Fantastical.”
The app has been completely redesigned with a new at-a-glance screen as well as a unique calendar screen that offers a higher density of information than iCal. Simmons is also particularly proud of the new Japanese support which can react to written Japanese and create appointments on the fly.
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At its core Fantasical works by parsing written appointments. To set something up you simply type in what you’re planning to do and when. The app takes each part of the sentence and drags it into the corresponding field, a trick that is actually quite pleasing to watch. In addition to this functionality the update adds a full at-a-glance, color-coded calendar as well as support for multiple calendars. You can also set up geofenced reminders and even hide “sets” of calendars depending on where you are using your apps.
The new app is $39.99 at launch and $49.99. It is available now.
Why is this important? Fantastical is one of the first apps to add automation to personal information management, a feature that is now common in apps like Mailbox, Sunrise, and Outlook for iOS. It was this simple attention to detail – to offer you exactly what you needed when you needed it – that set off the entire applications streamlining that now defines desktop and mobile apps. Simmons found that the app is especially popular in Japan where this sort of secretary-on-a-chip software is quite popular. Now if only Alex would accept my pork-eating invitation…