Fantastical Updated With Home Screen Widgets, Scribble Support on iPad, and More

Wednesday September 23, 2020 7:27 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

Popular calendar app Fantastical today received an update with support for new iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 features, including Home Screen widgets and Scribble.

fantastical home screen widgets
A dozen customizable widgets are available, providing users with the date, a monthly calendar, scheduled events and tasks, and even the weather at a glance. All of the widgets are free to use, while widgets that incorporate Fantastical Premium features like conference call detection require a subscription for $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year.

Scribble support allows iPad users to handwrite in any field with the Apple Pencil and have it automatically converted to text.

The full release notes for version 3.2:

- Widgets for iOS 14! 12 new and customizable widgets to view the date, weather, calendar, upcoming events, and tasks right on your home screen.
- Support for Scribble on iPadOS 14
- Support for new date and time pickers on iOS 14
- Recurring events are now shown more prominently when viewing hidden items
- Short back-to-back events are now less likely to overlap in Day and Week views
- Fixed an issue where sync to Google could get stuck in some situations
- Fixed an issue where sync errors on Zoom accounts sometimes wouldn't be shown
- Fixed an issue where notifications for recurring events could disappear suddenly
- Fixed an issue where deleting an event in the Apple Watch app wouldn't sync to the phone
- Various fixes and improvements

Fantastical is available on the App Store.

Tags: Fantastical, Scribble, Widgets Guide

Top Rated Comments

jb-net

72 months ago

Fantastical's subscription model is the best showcase how not to do it. A subscription to use widgets :rolleyes: They lost most of their year-long-loyal paying customers, including me (who spent over 100 USD on different versions), when the switched to the new subscription model. Be aware: Fantastical doesn't care about loyal paying customers!

Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)

posguy99

72 months ago

Fantastical's subscription model is the best showcase how not to do it. A subscription to use widgets :rolleyes: They lost most of their year-long-loyal paying customers, including me (who spent over 100 USD on different versions), when the switched to the new subscription model. Be aware: Fantastical doesn't care about loyal paying customers!

Fantastical's switch to subscription could be used in case studies of how to piss off users of your application. They turned it into nagware, didn't matter whether you had purchased the previous version and were quite happy with it or not.

Score: 22 Votes (Like | Disagree)

LogicalApex

72 months ago

weird, because i had many pleasant exchanges with them over email when v3 relaunched..to where they gave me a free month or two and got me in the testflight beta. it is an essential piece of software to me.

and if it takes a small monthly sub fee to ensure ongoing, constant updates, i'll take the tradeoff compared to the YEARS where they let V2 just languish in both design and features.

also did you miss the part "All of the widgets are free to use."

We agree that ongoing development should be supported where possible. But I disagree that the subscription model is the only way to accomplish it.

But I've aired my grievances on this many times and Fantastical has no interest in shifting gears so I'm not going to waste time re-iterating it. They calculated that focusing on the customers who see the app as absolutely essential is their only focus for the future. They caught so much flack as they forced the painful choice down the throats of the rest of us at the same time...

They could have easily done Fantastical 3 on the App Store w/ a subscription model and put a one time notice in Fantastical 2 for us to download it and check it out and swap over if we want to. They could then have removed Fantastical 2 from the App Store so only those who already own the app could re-download it from purchase history. Even if they wanted to offer a nicer "base tier" to customers who owned Fantastical 2 in Fantastical 3 they could have done that by having a link in Fantastical 2 that launches 3 to let them know you owned it and all that jazz. Would have gotten them to the same place with zero damage to their image.

But here we are.

Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)

CarlJ

72 months ago

waiting for the onslaught of "a subscription for a calendar app? a CALENDAR app?" replies. old and tired.

if Fantastical is "just a calendar app," then it's not for you. if you see it mission control to schedule your entire life, then it's money well spent.

The thing is, Fantastical decided that they only cared about customers who LOVE their app, and their other customers who merely liked the app (even if they had paid handsomely for numerous versions in the past) could go screw themselves.

Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)

CarlJ

72 months ago

sigh. this keeps getting rehashed every time Flexibits is in the news.

When they released V3, they didn't remove ANY of the features from V2. Everything worked exactly the same as before. But if you wanted the new features, you had to jump aboard the subscription train. they didn't screw anyone.

Sigh yourself. Please tell me then why my app is littered with buttons that are advertisements for the paid version.

They also changed the app to have less information on the screen - information density was one of the defining features that made me prefer their previous version to all other calendar apps (and I paid them a bunch of money for a bunch of versions). The other was natural language input. Which was really nice, but now Siri can do the basics of that faster, without opening any app. To justify the expense, they excitedly explained how they added weather, which I don’t want in my calendar (I built my own weather station software and hardware, I don’t want their less accurate generic weather), and tracking of conference calls, which I don’t want (that all lives in my work calendar on my work machine - wouldn’t use my iPhone for work videoconferencing). I used to highly recommend Fantastical to people, but not any more.

Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)

dlopan

72 months ago

The minute I saw it's 40 a year, pass. Maybe for 1password or my vpn. Not much else

Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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Fantastical Updated With Home Screen Widgets, Scribble Support on iPad, and More

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