The Best Calendar App for Mac: Fantastical 2

Your Mac comes packed with a perfectly fine calendar app, but it’s lacking advanced features, multiple ways to view your calendar, and external service integration. For all that and more, we like Fantastical.

Fantastical 2

Platform: macOS
Price: $49.99

Features

• Menu bar app for easy access to your daily schedule
• Full calendar view with special day, week, month, and year views
• Today widget for Notification Center
• Displays maps with your events
• Reminders are integrated into your calendar events
• Natural language input lets you type events in natural language, like “meet Andy for lunch tomorrow.” Supports English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.
• Dark and light themes
• Keyboard shortcut support for adding events and reminders
• Availability scheduling
• Time zone support
• Handoff support
• Works with iCloud, Google, Exchange, Yahoo, and any other CalDAV account
• Easy to toggle between different calendars with Calendar Sets
• Calendar printing options for those who like a paper calendar
• Google Hangouts support for one-click meetings

Where It Excels

Fantastical’s biggest draw is its ease of use. For those who like to quickly add an event to their calendar and stay organized, you can do so from your Mac’s menu bar using a shortcut. The natural language input is phenomenal, allowing you to add events quickly by typing in something like, “Dinner with Waluigi next Tuesday,” or “Call Comcast March 4 at 8am.” For those who need serious calendar management, you can open up the full app to get detailed views for your month, day, or week.

The menu bar app might be my personal favorite part of Fantastical, but it’s certainly not the only positive feature. Fantastical makes everything easy. You can edit events with a click, sort your calendars into specific sets so you can toggle multiple calendars on and off with a click, and the inclusion of to-dos from Reminders makes it easy to see everything on your plate for the day at once.

Fantastical also fully integrates with a number of Google and Exchange calendar features, which means you can schedule your availability or check the availability of co-workers. Fantastical is also updated often, which means it supports all of Apple’s newest gadgets and operating system features, including support for Notification Center widgets.

Where It Falls Short

The price is easily the biggest problem with Fantastical, because $50 for a calendar is a lot to ask. Regardless, it’s comparable to other desktop calendar applications and you’ll get an app that’s well supported by the developer for years. The fact is, if you need more power than Apple’s free desktop app, you’ll need to shell out the cash. There’s good news though, you cancheck out Fantastical for freefor a 21 day trial before you commit.



Via lifehacker