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Fantastical Unifies Its Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch Calendar Experience With Weather, Tasks, Meeting Proposals, and More
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The scam is that you are more or less forced into creating a Fantastical cloud account and trust them with your personal data.
If you delete and reinstall the app or install it on a new device, you have to create a user account or the app won't work. If you want to use the Watch app, you have to create a user account. This means they force/trick you into their home-brew cloud and trust them with your personal data. Why, because they are more clever than the countless other home-brew cloud services which got hacked?
Things 3 is top notch and no subscription. I use it every day.
Cool. I'll check it out then. Thanks.
Apple Watch app tries to connect with phone and can’t. Red arrow circle keeps going on the watch.
I'm also someone who is self-employed and someone who does plenty of consultancy work. If a high-quality calendar app was of paramount importance to me, I would want the very best and most reliable tool for the job. $40 per year would easily be a price worth paying. I think it's a worthwhile investment with a clear financial return for you if it helps keep clients happy. I say this assuming you're doing well enough that this is a negligible business expense compared to your overall income, assuming because you probably wouldn't even be "playing" in this ecosystem otherwise.
Yes, sort of...
I do well enough that I can afford a $40/yr calendar app; not so flush that I spend $40 on an app without thinking about it! I may not keep it post-trial, we'll see.
The functionality is worth it, but begrudgingly. $20 it would be a no-brainer. I seriously wonder what research they did into the pricing - it feels (subjectively, I know) that they would shift more than twice as many licenses at half the price. Could be wrong of course.
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natural language processing
appointment scheduling options
calendar sets
desktop widget
etc.
There's plenty there if you dig in a bit deeper.
Congrats! You have to create a Fantastical cloud account or the Watch app won't work. But Fantastical's cloud will surely be more secure than the countless other cloud services which get hacked every year, because... they say so! So go and trust them with your calendar and reminder data (including names, physical addresses, e-mail addresses, birthdays, business data like attached meeting agendas, etc.)!
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Calvetica also does this. I've used it that way for many years. I switched to Fantastical when iOS 13 broke Calvetica, and it was no longer in the store. But enough people emailed the author that he quickly fixed it, returned the update version to the store, and I switched back, but I kept Fantastical and check it out from time to time to see how it handles edge cases like repeats with holes.
I only have Fantastical on my iPhone, and it replicates the iCloud accounts, Gmail accounts, Comcast account, and my (work) Exchange server account. Going from v2 to v3 made essentially no change for me (and I did not sign up for trial), except I have little red icons indicating the subscription options - all on things I don't care about. It sounds to me like the iPhone app is clean, but the iPad, Watch, and Mac apps need some (or a bunch of) work.
So I CREATED a Flexibits account on my iPhone using Sign-in with Apple and on my iPad I then SIGNED IN (also using the Apple sign in). But on my MacBook even though I clicked on sign in it only let me CREATE an account. I did that and checked appleid.apple.com and now there are 2 Fantastical accounts listed there which are linked to iCloud. Is this normal?
Macstories has a record of the new fantastical app.
www.macstories.net
Worth a read, if nothing else.
My guess is that constant accuweather access probably costs flexibits a fair amount of money, hence the price. In the past, I liked its calendar widget and that it just looked so much nicer than the stock calendar app. Now, the main advantage is still its natural language parser but personally, I don’t think I use it enough to justify the new subscription pricing.
The New Fantastical Review
Over six years after the debut of the second major iteration of Fantastical – version 2.0 for iPhone, which I reviewed in October 2013 – Flexibits is introducing a new version of their popular hybrid calendar client/task manager today. The new Fantastical1, available today on the App Store, is a...
www.macstories.net
Worth a read, if nothing else.
My guess is that constant accuweather access probably costs flexibits a fair amount of money, hence the price. In the past, I liked its calendar widget and that it just looked so much nicer than the stock calendar app. Now, the main advantage is still its natural language parser but personally, I don’t think I use it enough to justify the new subscription pricing.
Surely one of the most important functionalities of an calendar app. Especially if all your devices already have pre-installed weather apps. 😂
You can upgrade to Fantastical 3 for free. You just won't get premium features.
People might be freaking out a little prematurely here. I think the subscription is only for premium features. The regular calendar might actually be free now.
No joke. Talk about shoveling in unneeded things to try to justify the price.
iCal's natural language processor is pretty good now too. The only reason I installed Fantastical was to have a mini calendar app embedded as a menubar widget.
Yeah, like "Interesting calendars" and an ALL-NEW UI. 😂
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You have to create a Fantastical cloud account to use the Watch app and trust them with your personal data, because Watch sync will go through Fantastical's cloud servers. Let's offer hackers one more attack vector to your personal data!
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The fix (found on Twitter) is to sign up for the two week sub, remove app from watch, re-install then it works. Make sure to cancel the sub before it starts charging in two weeks (I cancelled right away and watch still worked). I uninstalled altogether since then as I’m done with their app.
You also got to have a Fantastical cloud account if you delete and reinstall the app, or if you install it on a new device, because in these cases it won't recognise you as an v2 user, anymore.
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Always nice when your app maker of choice makes your life a little "easier", by forcing you to perform leaps to get basic functionalities.
Macstories has a record of the new fantastical app.
The New Fantastical Review
Over six years after the debut of the second major iteration of Fantastical – version 2.0 for iPhone, which I reviewed in October 2013 – Flexibits is introducing a new version of their popular hybrid calendar client/task manager today. The new Fantastical1, available today on the App Store, is a...
Worth a read, if nothing else.
My guess is that constant accuweather access probably costs flexibits a fair amount of money, hence the price. In the past, I liked its calendar widget and that it just looked so much nicer than the stock calendar app. Now, the main advantage is still its natural language parser but personally, I don’t think I use it enough to justify the new subscription pricing.
Wonder how much he was paid to push a positive review of version 3.
Yeah but I did not much like having to create an account to be able to use it on the watch. They say its necessary so that things synch even when you don’t have your phone.
From his write up, it appears to meet his needs in numerous ways.
I have read a lot of his work and he has always struck me as honest.
This is just not true. I may not choose to subscribe, as it lacks a feature that matters to me, but this is not an unreasonable approach.
Flexibits has already done one paid upgrade, so this is just a different approach to matching the revenue with the costs.
This is the problem that non-developers do not seem to understand and complain about both sides. Apple is constantly updating its platforms and requiring changes to existing apps. There is a cost to doing this for the developers. On one thread I see complaints that Apple will no longer support 32-bit apps, some of which have been abandoned by their developers and on this and other threads I see complaints about ensuring that developers have an ongoing revenue stream to support these apps. For this last round of software updates, Apple added dark mode, iPadOS with different multi-tasking, a standalone Apple watch App, required notarization for macOS, eliminated 32-bit support, and many more things. Just implementing those changes requires a lot of work. Migrating to SwiftUI to ensure one is ready for future changes takes even more work.
There are reasonable questions about if the price is the right price, if there should be a way to make it so that I get to keep the last version for which I paid (or after x months of subscription, I get to keep a set of features), etc., but to argue that they offer nothing for this money is just wrong.
My bet (or maybe my hope) is that they did some market research and discovered that only a small percentage of their customers will be willing to pay for a subscription at any price, and that those who are willing will pay their $5/$3.33 asking price needed to ensure profitability.
It is clear from the blog post that announced the change, that they knew that it would be an issue for some of their customers, so they were not deluded into believing that everyone would pay no matter the cost.
Not having been in their meetings, I have not idea what they were actually thinking, but I can say that this change enables several things that can improve their customer experience. I no longer need to purchase versions for multiple platforms, meaning it is much more likely that all users will have all versions.
This creates an incentive to develop features that take advantage of that cross platform ability. Having a predictable revenue stream makes development planning easier. It also makes it so that features can be rolled out as soon as they are ready, rather than trying to bundle them together into groups interesting enough to get people to pay for them as upgrades.
For a really good analysis of this watch this: App Subscriptions: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.
That would have bothered me as well, if they didn’t offer “sign in with Apple.”