If you are like me, your life is managed chaos. At any moment, like dominos, it could all go down. I live and die by my calendar – for work, for family, for friends. So searching for a calendar app for my iPhone was a big deal. I absolutely had to have a calendar app that would not fail – but actually make my life easier. It couldn’t be complicated or finicky, either. And I found it with Fantastical.
By far, the coolest feature for me is its voice recognition software. I can literally speak into my phone and Fantastical magically takes what I’m saying and creates an event with the date, time, and description no matter how convoluted my message into the mic was. I’m not quite sure how it does this magic trick, but it can take a typical sentence from me such as “Friday night, drinks with my friend Heather after 5pm in Milford” and turns it into a calendar entry on this coming Friday for 5:15PM and describes it as “Drinks with Heather in Milford”. Love that.
Another challenge for me was always merging my work and life schedules. When I’m home, I need to see my work calendar. When I’m at work, I need my home schedule. What made it more difficult for me was my work schedule is in constant flux – my staff is adding and deleting events to our shared work calendar, but unless I caught everything, I’m wearing a suit, dropping the kids off early at school and bringing my laptop to work on a Tuesday, only to discover the meeting was moved to Thursday.
Now, I just plug my phone into the charger attached to my desktop computer and ‘voila’, the two calendars are magically merged. No more missed meetings! No more leaving kids stranded at school! This app has actually improved my life. How often can we claim that when talking about an app?
There are several other neat features to Fantastical, but check out this little video found with this link (after you click on the link, click on “Watch This Video”). Bravo to Flexibits for creating an intuitive, intelligent app for real working people.
Download Fantastical for the iPhone here, at the Apple Store.
