Fantastical 2 is a fast and easy to use calendar and reminders app, that integrates with the calendar accounts set up on the built-in iOS Calendar apps and the reminders app. With natural language inputs, snooze for alerts and night mode, Fantastical 2 has many features that will interest people who are looking to get more out of their calendar and reminders.
There are three main views on Fantastical. The day ticker can be seen along the top of the app, showing a brief overview of events to come. Events are depicted by coloured bars, which are the colour of the calendar that event is on. All day events are at the top, whilst events throughout the day are below. By dragging the time ticker down, you can see a more detailed hour by hour view, sort of like in Calendars.app weekly view.
Below the day ticker you’ll see an event view sidebar next to a monthly overview. The event view sidebar shows you all your events in order of starting time, and you can easily tap on any event to quickly edit it. The monthly overview simply shows you the current days in the months, and coloured dots depicting calendar events.
Fantastical on the iPhone is very similar to it on the iPad, however as there is less screen space, the app doesn’t show the month view.
A nice feature is that when you move a certain view – for example scrolling down the event sidebar – all the other views move with you. This is handy as it keeps all your views in sync and you don’t need to waste time moving them all around. Tapping on the month at the top of the app returns you to your current day.
Fantastical also offers a Today view widget that is handy if you want to quickly check in on your events or view your calendar. The compact view shows important information about your calendar events. If you are in an event, it will show the event name, location and time. If you have an event coming up soon, you’ll see that event name, along with the time to the event. To the right of the compact view, you’ll see a timeline that shows your events as bars along a timescale, allowing you to easily visualise the next few hours of the day.
The larger widget is the month view. It shows you all the events of the day and the time they are occurring, and you can change the month it shows and the day, so you can see what events you have tomorrow, next week and so on.
If you often add locations to your event, Fantastical allows you to easily add location which can then be opened in Apple Maps so you can navigate to them.
If you use iMessage a lot, another weirder feature of Fantastical is its animated iMessage stickers. These are mostly event related animated Fantastical logos. They’re a cool feature, but I don’t think they’ll be used much.
An Apple Watch app also comes with Fantastical for iPhone. With the Watch app, you can create events, as well as using Fantastical on your watch complication to see information about your next event right on your watch face.
The Mac app for Fantastical is similar to the iPad and iPhone app, but with a few more interface differences because of the much larger screen. The day view occupies the main screen whilst the month view is at the top left, and event view at the bottom left. Selecting an event brings up a small window to the right that brings up more information about the event.
Fantastical is an awesome app, and I recommend purchasing it for you Apple devices. The apps are sold separately for iPad, iPhone and macOS, and you can purchase them below.
- Fantastical for iPad – £9.99
- Fantastical for iPhone & Apple Watch – £4.99
- Fantastical for macOS – £48.99
Thanks for reading!
