Better than busycal for free#

There are examples in Fantastical’s help system (which, of course, I didn’t look at because why would I do that?) for defining yearly and weekly events.įor a while I thought Bus圜al would be that second calendar program. I was confused by the layout of the event definition area, which doesn’t have a “repeat” field until you type one of the key words (like a day of the week or “every”) into the descriptive sentence. You’ll need another calendar program for that or if you need to print your calendars.Īs pointed out by Alex Chan in the comments, Fantastical does have a syntax for entering repeating dates. The only other downside I’ve noticed is that it has no facility for defining repeating events. If you favor week or days views (I don’t), Fantastical is not for you-it’s month only. The fields in the event definition area fill in as you type in the entry field. The natural language parsing for event entries has never been confused in the three months I’ve been using it. Clicking the mouse on another window or tapping the Escape key 5 puts the window away.Įverything about Fantastical works as it’s described to work. As with iCal, ⌘T brings you back to today from wherever you’ve scrolled to. You can scroll forward and backward either by clicking the arrow buttons or typing the → or ← keys. 4 The entry field at the top of the window is where you type the sentence fragment that defines a new event. The day numbers, although gray, are dark enough for me to read easily, and today’s date is prominently marked. If you want to look three months ahead, rapidly tapping the right arrow button or typing ⌘→ three times in succession won’t get you to the month you want because iCal waits until its page flipping animation is done before deigns to accept another “next month” command.įantastical has a simple month view that pops out of the menu bar when you click its icon or type its hotkey (⌃⌥-Space by default). It’s not the skeuomorphism per se that bothers me-a little skeuomorphism never hurt anyone 3-it’s the jarringly ugly color Apple chose: a yellow-brown that brings to mind the phrases “puke” and “baby shit.” There’s also the problem with the dates being too pale for my 51-year-old eyes. Like everyone, 2 I find the faux leather look annoying. My reasons for wanting an iCal replacement?. I gave Bus圜al a brief tryout a couple of years ago and decided that its advantages over iCal weren’t worth $50.īoth Fantastical and Bus圜al read and write iCal’s data files, so you can switch back and forth between all three calendars. Bus圜al is best known as “iCal with more and better syncing and sharing options.” It, too, has an entry system for times and dates that’s less rigid and clumsy than iCal’s, but it isn’t as sentence-like as Fantastical’s.Fantastical will interpret this sentence and fill in the description, date, time, and location fields. An example: Lunch with Janet on 3/13 at 11am at Panera. It’s main claim to fame is a natural language engine that allows you to enter events by typing sentence fragments instead of tabbing from field to field.

Fantastical is a small calendar that lives in your menu bar and pops out when you need it.

I doubt I really need to describe either one-they were both given workouts by several reviewers back when Lion came out and everyone was horrified by the new iCal that came with it-but for completeness, here’s the nickel version: So I’ve been using both programs in parallel since late December.

1 At least that’s the case for me I’m sure there are heavily scheduled people who can judge a calendar in just a day or two. In practice, though, a calendar program-unlike, say, a text editor or a web browser-doesn’t get the kind of intense, hours-long use that allows it to be properly judged in a limited time.

Better than busycal for free#

Each program can be downloaded and used for free for a couple of weeks. In theory, I didn’t have to buy both applications to try them out. I won’t keep you in suspense: Fantastical won. I thought it odd to have two calendar programs in one bundle, but it was actually a stroke of genius marketing, because I bought the bundle specifically to test out both calendar applications as replacements for iCal. Next post Previous post Fantastical and Bus圜alīack in December, there was a discount bundle that included both Fantastical and Bus圜al.