Fantastical Review

iCal is perhaps one of the most used app to get our schedule organized, be it work or any reminders. Most of us use it right away when we log in our mac. It also has some shortcomings. To complement iCal with many more features, here comes an app called Fantastical. It is a calendar app that you might love to use frequently. It also supports Outlook and other calendar apps for Mac OS X like Busycal and Entourage.

It stays in your menu bar. When you click on it, you will see a sleek and handy calendar that will drop down for your use. You can add events and search as well. You can see some elegant work with the calendar, like highlighting of event dates, the circle made on the dates, the hinges from the calendar hangs. It has been beautifully done. After using this app you will not use iCal more often for sure.

It syncs perfectly with iCal. It shows all of your iCal events in its calendar. When you add an event to Fantastical, it automatically adds them to iCal. There is a text box on the top of the app, so that you can add events into it super quick. You can add an event by selecting a date also. It has a very easy way to add event, by just typing into the text box. You can add an invitee if you wish to. Write an event in English with date and time, it will automatically create the event for you. It also shows several options when creating an event.  It supports reminders as iCal and iOS. It also supports to-do lists which is very handy too. Unlike previous versions, the updated version supports editing and you can delete events too. If you have to add few details or delete something, you can do that now.

This app syncs with your iOS devices with the help of WebDav services such as iCloud, MobileMe and Google Calender. Local iCal events are synced with iTunes. It also automatically adds alarms which can be customized, to your events so that you don’t miss by mistake. It has an instant search which searches all of your past, present, future events. Specific event lists can be searched too.

Fantastical has support for keyboard shortcut too. You can launch the application by pressing a hot key. In its preferences, you can hide some events so that no one can see except you. It comes with many languages like English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish so that you can write your events in your preferred languages.