Apple Calendar App Revamp Confirmed by Job Posting

[joecomo]

don’t forget the contacts app, please

 

[garranhado]

By the date of job post and company acquisition this changes we will see in iOS 20.

 

[n-evo]

including natural language parsing for entering events

Calendar has that on macOS.

 

[mwhite]

What is Apple going to do now to something that isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing?

 

[Kaptajn Haddock]

The problem with Calendar (as with Music etc etc) is that they are forever adding new features while failing to address the basic problem that the front end always truncates entries and doesn’t actually show you sufficient information to be useful

Especially for birthdays where people have long names, making it impossible to see their age.

 

[Steve121178]

As long as they don't 'AI-ify' it, it should be fine. One of the draws of Apple's stock apps is that they are so easy to use.

Adding modern functionality to apps like Mail & Calendar shouldn't make them any less easy to use. Unfortunately Apple's approach is to keep the app looking exactly the same as it's been for the last 10+ years but just bolt on added functionality which just makes things confusing or annoying for people.

Mail, Calendar, Reminders & Notes are in urgent need of a complete modern revamp. If it upsets a few people along the way, so be it. Apple's stock apps are so far behind the competition, it's not even funny anymore.

 

[jchap]

By the date of job post and company acquisition this changes we will see in iOS 20.

Indeed. If they're only just looking for another team member now, and they expect this team member to give major input on the updated UI and functionality, we may not see those changes for at least another refresh cycle.

 

[jchap]

The problem with Calendar (as with Music etc etc) is that they are forever adding new features while failing to address the basic problem that the front end always truncates entries and doesn’t actually show you sufficient information to be useful

Indeed.

The Calendar app is based on a grid system, so anything that doesn't fit within that grid system naturally needs to be truncated. Some ways to improve that might be:

• automatically expand the truncated entry on mouseover (on macOS)
• offer a flexible layout in the Week view that shows the full task titles (expanding the blocks of the events) without respect to the grid (not sure how they could do that, though).

They do give you the option to reduce the text size for the calendar events, but there's only so far that goes.

I think that Day view has always been rather underwhelming, especially on macOS. Too much blank space in the right sidebar where all the event metadata goes—very minimal, but pretty pointless and devoid of functionality. The yearly calendars on macOS for Day view show up in both the top right and bottom left corners as well, which seems like a wasted opportunity and needless, unless you're on a very widescreen monitor and need the yearly calendar plastered all about your screen. A simple Schedule view like Google's Calendar on Android is also missed in Apple's Calendar apps.

Like other people posting to this thread, I really hope they don't just add lots of AI bling without giving a lot more thought to the basic UI elements of Calendar that have remained static for far too many years. We might have to wait a while before they do something meaningful, but then again we have already been waiting a long time.