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