As a mostly-satisfied BusyCal user on Mac since 2012, and a devoted Fantastical user on iOS, I was very interested to take the new Fantastical 2 for Mac (F2) for a spin. I have them both open side-by-side right now.
I was particularly excited about the new 'Calendar Sets' feature in F2, since I use about 50 shared Google Calendars. (At my workplace each piece of shared equipment is booked on its own calendar, as is each conference room. I also have the usual shared family calendars, holiday schedules, etc.)
Multi-calendar support in BusyCal
BusyCal makes calendar organization and selection a first-class experience:
You can also create named sets of calendars, using BusyCal's 'Smart Filters'. Each filter gets a slim button across the top of the window which can be used to switch to that view. (Smart Filters are even more powerful, but I only use them for calendar sets). Once viewing a particular set, you can also toggle visibility of individual calendars manually.
Calendar sets in F2
I was hoping that Fantastical 2 might offer some of this same functionality along with its trademark beautiful design and awesome natural-language parsing, but I have found that their 'Calendar Sets' feature is much more limited. You can go into the app's preferences and define named sets of calendars, and then toggle between them using a dropdown menu, but that's it.
While actually using the app, you can't see a list of the visible calendars with corresponding names/colors, and you can't manually toggle visibility of a calendar without going back into the app's preferences (there is a shortcut to the preferences within the Calendar Set drop-down).
I'm a little baffled by this--Google Calendar, the native OS X Calendar, Outlook, BusyCal, pretty much every multi-calendar app I've ever used, has given over some UI space to the list of calendars. So it seems to be a deliberate decision, but it really compromises usability for me.
I guess they did it to make space for the very Fantastical-on-iOS scrolling list of events, but frankly this feels kind of odd and redundant to me. The vertically-scrolling events view was an awesome solution to the problem of how to present a user's calendar timeline on an iPhone screen (or in a menubar applet), but it feels kind of 'bolted on' and unjustified on the large-screen Mac app.
Week/Month/Year Views
F2 does not have true multi-week or multi-day views. By default, 'Month' view always shows 6 weeks starting at the beginning of a calendar month. So on, say, March 25th, most of the screen is given over to events that are in the past. If you try to scroll by a couple weeks so that you can see a little more of the future, Fantastical snaps to the next calendar month.
The OS X Calendar.app handles this much better: It snaps to the start of the month initially, but it allows you to scroll by smaller increments. BusyCal doesn't have the buttery-smooth scrolling of Fantastical or Calendar.app, but it does allow you to define 'Month' view as a multi-week period starting in the current week. It also allows you to scroll by smaller increments using on-screen buttons.
The same problem is there in Week view: Fantastical snaps to the start of the week (Sunday by default), even if you are clearly trying to just scroll forward or back by a couple days. Again Calendar.app and BusyCal handle this better.
Fantastical's year view is pretty nice: it shows a heatmap based on how busy each day is, and shows that day's events on hover. BusyCal also has a nice year view, with small colored bubbles representing individual events.
Adding events using natural language
Fantastical's ability to add events using natural language is just as kick-ass in the Mac app, as far as I can tell (I especially love the syntax that allows me to add an event to a particular calendar by ending the event with '/' followed by a substring from the shared calendar name).
BusyCal tried to build a natural-language processing engine and menubar applet in a recent revision, but I found both to be very underwhelming, requiring very specific phrasing. Thankfully, it's reasonably easy to create events the old-fashioned way when I'm at the computer.
Conclusions
Fantastical for Mac feels to me like a hybrid between the iOS app, and Calendar.app, but with a few more rough edges. It is beautiful, but it doesn't have the 'power user' features that BusyCal does, so I think it will have a harder time commanding the premium price that BusyCal does.
Since both apps use the same backing store (i.e. they can both sync with Google), I will continue my hybrid, best-of-both worlds existence, using BusyCal on Mac and Fantastical on iOS.
For the next 14 days (until my Fantastical trial expires) I will have access to both apps side-by-side; happy to answer questions if anyone has any.
I was particularly excited about the new 'Calendar Sets' feature in F2, since I use about 50 shared Google Calendars. (At my workplace each piece of shared equipment is booked on its own calendar, as is each conference room. I also have the usual shared family calendars, holiday schedules, etc.)
Multi-calendar support in BusyCal
BusyCal makes calendar organization and selection a first-class experience:
- There is a dedicated sidebar where you can drag to reorder and organize calendars into folders (called 'Calendar Groups' in BusyCal).
- You can rename calendars within BusyCal (which helps if the calendar owner gave it a dumb/long/ambiguous name).
- You can unsubscribe from (and hide) calendars that you never look at, but don't want to delete from Google.
- You can toggle visibility for individual calendars or whole groups of calendars from the sidebar.
- The sidebar also acts as a legend for the event color.
You can also create named sets of calendars, using BusyCal's 'Smart Filters'. Each filter gets a slim button across the top of the window which can be used to switch to that view. (Smart Filters are even more powerful, but I only use them for calendar sets). Once viewing a particular set, you can also toggle visibility of individual calendars manually.
Calendar sets in F2
I was hoping that Fantastical 2 might offer some of this same functionality along with its trademark beautiful design and awesome natural-language parsing, but I have found that their 'Calendar Sets' feature is much more limited. You can go into the app's preferences and define named sets of calendars, and then toggle between them using a dropdown menu, but that's it.
While actually using the app, you can't see a list of the visible calendars with corresponding names/colors, and you can't manually toggle visibility of a calendar without going back into the app's preferences (there is a shortcut to the preferences within the Calendar Set drop-down).
I'm a little baffled by this--Google Calendar, the native OS X Calendar, Outlook, BusyCal, pretty much every multi-calendar app I've ever used, has given over some UI space to the list of calendars. So it seems to be a deliberate decision, but it really compromises usability for me.
I guess they did it to make space for the very Fantastical-on-iOS scrolling list of events, but frankly this feels kind of odd and redundant to me. The vertically-scrolling events view was an awesome solution to the problem of how to present a user's calendar timeline on an iPhone screen (or in a menubar applet), but it feels kind of 'bolted on' and unjustified on the large-screen Mac app.
Week/Month/Year Views
F2 does not have true multi-week or multi-day views. By default, 'Month' view always shows 6 weeks starting at the beginning of a calendar month. So on, say, March 25th, most of the screen is given over to events that are in the past. If you try to scroll by a couple weeks so that you can see a little more of the future, Fantastical snaps to the next calendar month.
The OS X Calendar.app handles this much better: It snaps to the start of the month initially, but it allows you to scroll by smaller increments. BusyCal doesn't have the buttery-smooth scrolling of Fantastical or Calendar.app, but it does allow you to define 'Month' view as a multi-week period starting in the current week. It also allows you to scroll by smaller increments using on-screen buttons.
The same problem is there in Week view: Fantastical snaps to the start of the week (Sunday by default), even if you are clearly trying to just scroll forward or back by a couple days. Again Calendar.app and BusyCal handle this better.
Fantastical's year view is pretty nice: it shows a heatmap based on how busy each day is, and shows that day's events on hover. BusyCal also has a nice year view, with small colored bubbles representing individual events.
Adding events using natural language
Fantastical's ability to add events using natural language is just as kick-ass in the Mac app, as far as I can tell (I especially love the syntax that allows me to add an event to a particular calendar by ending the event with '/' followed by a substring from the shared calendar name).
BusyCal tried to build a natural-language processing engine and menubar applet in a recent revision, but I found both to be very underwhelming, requiring very specific phrasing. Thankfully, it's reasonably easy to create events the old-fashioned way when I'm at the computer.
Conclusions
Fantastical for Mac feels to me like a hybrid between the iOS app, and Calendar.app, but with a few more rough edges. It is beautiful, but it doesn't have the 'power user' features that BusyCal does, so I think it will have a harder time commanding the premium price that BusyCal does.
Since both apps use the same backing store (i.e. they can both sync with Google), I will continue my hybrid, best-of-both worlds existence, using BusyCal on Mac and Fantastical on iOS.
For the next 14 days (until my Fantastical trial expires) I will have access to both apps side-by-side; happy to answer questions if anyone has any.
