With reminders, you can even add a geofence that transfers properly to Reminders or the iPhone version of Fantastical so you’ll be alerted when you leave or arrive at the specified location. The workaround for this turns out to be to enclose your desired title in quotes Fantastical doesn’t try to parse quoted text. To be in the title of the event so I don’t have to double-click the event to see the location in a popover. My only minor annoyance with the natural language processing is that I sometimes want the location You can define alerts to be applied automatically. Either opens a new event popover into which you can type event details like “Snowshoeing at Hammond Hill at 6:30.” Fantastical turns such text into an event titled “Snowshoeing” with a location of “Hammond Hill” and a start time of 6:30 PM. When you want a new event, just double-click the appropriate day or click the plus button at the top of the sidebar. This is welcome - there’s far too little locational awareness among Mac and iOS apps. You switch between calendar sets using a pop-up menu at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, but Fantastical can even change them automatically based on your Mac’s location. With Fantastical, you can easily separate sets of calendars, so, for instance, I can hide personal calendars for the school district and various clubs I’m in while pondering Take Control release schedule weeks.
It’s not hard to turn individual calendars on and off in Apple’s Calendar, but it gets tedious fast, so most people don’t bother. That can add up to a lot of calendars, and perhaps the most welcome innovation in Fantastical is its concept of calendar sets. It also brings in and displays to-do items from iCloud (the things you’d usually access in Apple’s Reminders app), and can show birthdays and anniversaries based on date information stored in Apple’s Contacts app. Rather than just tie into Calendar’s data, Flexibits wrote their own native CalDAV engine for Fantastical, which gives it direct access to iCloud, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar. In this respect, it’s extremely similar to the company’s well-regarded versions of Fantastical for the iPhone and iPad, and if you already like one or both of them more than iOS 8’sĬalendar app (as I do), you’ll be at home in the Mac version. Notably, Fantastical boasts a left-hand sidebar that shows a mini month view and a highly useful list of both upcoming events and dated reminders (a quick click on a checkmark button switches the list to show only reminders). Flexibits has now expanded Fantastical beyond the menu bar, making it into a standalone app with a full calendar window with standard day, week, month, and year views. The initial version of Fantastical was a focused menu bar utility that extended Calendar by showing your schedule with a click and making it easy to enter new events with natural language processing. It’s always refreshing to see a Mac developer step up to take a swing at the incumbent, and that’s just what Flexibits is doing with Fantastical 2. It’s hard to make a business case for the time and effort necessary to create a new app when you have to convince every customer to switch from a free alternative that’s already installed. However, bundled software has a chilling effect on competition, and thus on innovation. It is of course a good thing that every Mac user has access to a generally capable calendaring app for free - that’s necessary to ensure that OS X remains competitive with other operating systems. #1621: Apple Q3 2022 financials, Slack's new free plan restrictions, which OS features do you use?īundled apps - such as Apple’s OS X Calendar - tread an uneasy path.#1622: OS feature survey results, Continuity Camera webcam preview, OWC miniStack STX.#1623: How to turn off YouTube's PiP, use AirPlay to Mac, and securely erase Mac drives.#1624: Important OS security updates, rescuing QuickTake 150 photos, AirTag alerts while traveling.#1625: Apple's "Far Out" event, the future of FileMaker, free NMUG membership, Quick Note and tags in Notes, Plex suffers data breach.
0 kommentar(er)
