Best Free Calendar App Toolbar For Mac 2018

by

The perfect calendar app is hard to find because it has to be easy to use, present you with all the data you need, and provide integrations with the right data sources to help you not only plan your day, but also allow you to execute your plan and quickly and easily capture new events as you find out about them.

Jun 07, 2017  The 34 Best Mac Menu Bar Apps. Product Hunt. Fantastical: The calendar app you won’t be able to live without “I use Fantastical at least 5 times a day.”. I’ve had a free account for over six years and logged 6607h 29m of online time to date.” — Mike Taylor. May 18, 2017  Download.com hooks you up with the best free desktop customization software for Windows. Best Free Apps to Customize Windows. The Best Music Streaming Apps in 2018.

Canoscan n656u driver. Canon offers a wide range of compatible supplies and accessories that can enhance your user experience with you CanoScan N650U that you can purchase direct. Scroll down to easily select items to add to your shopping cart for a faster, easier checkout. Visit the Canon Online Store.

We spent months testing, trying, and using many different apps for the iPhone in our search for the best calendar app. We wanted to know which apps were the easiest to use for entering new events, viewing your current agenda, and more. Based on several different criteria, Fantastical was the clear choice for the best calendar app for iPhone and iPad.

  • Jun 07, 2017 The 34 Best Mac Menu Bar Apps. The calendar app you won’t be able to live. I’ve had a free account for over six years and logged 6607h 29m of online time.
  • BusyCal is an excellent calendar app for Mac, and comes with a solid iOS companion app that brings the experience to mobile. BusyCal supports iCloud, Google, and other CalDAV calendar systems, and offers color-coded month, day, week, and list view of your upcoming events.

In a nut, what makes Fantastical the best calendar app is its great design, superior natural language text entry, and its support for iCloud reminders. The recent release of version 3 has made it an even better pick with the addition of Calendar Sets and template events.

Criteria for the best calendar app

We defined the following metrics to help us evaluate all the iPhone calendar apps objectively:

  • Easy and fast to view appointments: The best calendar app needs to make it quick and easy to view your calendar. This means it provides different calendar views that are easy to switch between so you can visualize your events in the way that is most helpful to you.

  • Easy and fast to use for adding new events and finding upcoming ones: The best calendar app needs to have fast and easy event entry. To us, this means great natural language parsing (but more on that in a bit).

  • Works with necessary services (Google, iCloud, Exchange): If the calendar app can’t interface with the calendar syncing service you’re using, it can’t be the best because the app would be silo’d to your iPhone only.

The best calendar app for iOS: Fantastical

Fantastical meets all our criteria for a great calendar app, and we recommend it unreservedly for iPhone users of all ages, professions, and varying degrees of busy-ness.

It is the easiest to use (for adding/editing events) and the easiest to read (for checking schedules) for most people. Fantastical’s natural language parsing is second to none, making it fast and easy to add events, and it has a simple-yet-powerful design. The week ticker makes it easy to visualize your week ahead, a simple pull switches to a month calendar view, and it supports any calendar you can add to iOS. In addition to all this, it offers a series of full screen views that are designed to take advantage of whatever size screen you have from the iPhone 11 to the 12.9″ iPad Pro and everything else.

Fantastical’s design

On the iPhone, Fantastical offers a choice of two kinds of views: list or full screen. The list view has three options: the Tasks view, the DayTicker, and the Calendar view. Both the DayTicker and the calendar have a list of events below the visual area, and in the Settings, you can choose if that list should include all events, just the selected day, or the selected day and the following day, and the Tasks view is focused on your Reminders. You can pull down on the top area of the screen (such as the Tasks title) to get to the next view, and drag it up to enter the previous view.

  • The Tasks view shows your reminders ordered by reminder time or grouped by list, according to your preference.
  • The DayTicker is a great way to get a general overview of how busy the upcoming week is and to quickly swipe ahead to a specific date. The ticker shows lines (color coded to your calendars) indicating when you have events throughout each day.
  • With a simple pull on the week ticker, you can swap it out for a monthly calendar view, making it easy to get an overview of any month and the day of the week a date lands on, etc. Each date on the calendar with events scheduled shows a dot (again, color-coded to your calendars).
  • If you rotate your iPhone into landscape mode, it switches to a week “block” view, similar to what you see in Calendar in macOS. This gives you a great visualization of how your time is blocked out over the next week while also seeing details for each day. From the block view, you can also drag and drop events to change the time and date. In addition, you can also hide the sidebar and view your whole week across your iPhone screen.

Along with these views, you also have the option to turn on a great dark theme. It is clear that everything in Fantastical’s design was carefully considered and serves to improve the functionality of the app.

In addition to this you have the four full screen views, which include daily, weekly, monthly, and a yearly view. All of them are what you would expect with regards to their names, and while the weekly and monthly views look a little cramped on the iPhone 11 Pro screen, they’re a great overview of what’s going on. Thanks to the ability to tap the view options and use a “slide and release” gesture, you can easily switch to any other view quickly without it feeling like a chore. This allows you to zoom in and out on your time as easily as you can use the pinch to zoom in on the daily and weekly views to increase and decrease the space allocated per hour.

What makes Fantastical easy to use

A while ago, we took a little poll on Twitter regarding people’s calendar use on their iPhones. The results are not scientifically conclusive, but they do provide some interesting data points.

In the poll, we asked people how many events they enter into their iPhone on a weekly basis. Of 179 total responses:

  • 73% enter 1 or fewer events per day (130 people)
  • 21% enter an average of 2 events per day (38 people)
  • 6% enter an average of 3 events per day (10)
  • Less than 1% enter 4 or more events per day (1)

So, 94 percent of the total respondents use their iPhone calendar app two or fewer times per day to enter in a new event, while most of those people actually use it once or less per day.

Of the majority who do not enter multiple events per day on the iPhone, we think it’s safe to assume they never become deeply familiar with the user interface of their calendar app. This unfamiliarity leads to friction when entering events, whether you know it or not, because your brain has to process and re-learn the interface every time you enter a new event.

What is an “interface” we are extremely familiar with? Natural language.

We say things like “Meet Joe for lunch tomorrow at 12:30” all the time. It’s called “natural language” for a reason — we say these sentences in our conversations, emails, text messages, etc.

A calendar app that can accept and parse natural language is one we can use as infrequently as we want without suffering the consequences of an unfamiliar input interface. With Fantastical, you don’t have to enter text like a computer for the app to understand it.

Fantastical has the best natural language input mechanics of any other calendar app, far and away. Not only is it fast and intelligent at parsing just about any event- or reminder-based sentence, but Fantastical has easy-to-understand animations that let us know how the app is translating our words.

As Dr. Drang pointed out, Fantastical’s animations do more than dazzle:

The animations are providing instant feedback on how Fantastical is parsing your words and, more important, they’re teaching you Fantastical’s syntax.

Natural language parsing makes it easy to switch between entering an event or a reminder. For a reminder, you simply start by typing “task,” “todo,” or “reminder.” You can also toggle a switch (if you prefer) that tells Fantastical you’re entering a reminder and not an event.

Some examples of natural language expressions you can enter:

  • Shopping at Giant Eagle Saturday at 8am: Fantastical will create an event called “Shopping” with location “Giant Eagle” and schedule it for this upcoming Saturday at 8 am.

  • Vacation in Canada Aug 9-15th: Fantastical will create an event called “Vacation” with location “Canada” and schedule it as an all-day event August 9-15th.

  • task pick up milk at 4:30pm: Fantastical will create a reminder called “pick up milk” and alert you at 4:30pm.

  • Meeting every Wednesday at 1:30pm repeat weekly alert 10 min: Fantastical will create a repeating event called “Meeting” scheduled to repeat every Wednesday at 1:30pm with an alert 10 minutes before the start time (rather than the default reminder in the app).

(If you need a little more help making the most of natural language entry in Fantastical, make sure to download the guide at the beginning or end of this review.)

Fantastical 3 for iPhone also introduced a whole host of new features, cementing its choice as our pick. Template events and calendar sets (the ability to jump between groups of calendars you define quickly) make it even easier to keep track of your schedule on the go than ever. For more details, see our full review of Fantastical 3.

Fantastical is available on all Apple platforms, making it a great pick if you use more than one Apple device. For new users the subscription model may be hard to swallow, but for calendar pro users there’s easily enough here to justify the cost.

The competition

Calzones

If you schedule events in different timezones on a regular basis, Calzones is the app for you. It’s a one-time purchase for an app with a sleek, minimalist display. In the settings you can select as many timezones as you like and even give them custom names, such as the name of a friend who lives there. It offers a widget that focuses on showing you the current time in all your favorite zones. When you add an event, it uses a custom date and time picker that shows you the time in all of your configured timezones. The app also offers a variety of themes, and is a great app if you need a simple calendar app that’s more vibrant than the stock calendar app.

Outlook

Most of us have encountered Outlook in some way, shape, or form throughout our lives, at least as an email application. The iPhone version is primarily designed for email, but it also offers calendaring and contacts integration. Unlike the other picks on this list, you have to sign into your accounts in the app instead integrating with the calendars on your device. For most people, this involves creating an app-specific password, which is definitely a hurdle. It does offer views similar to the day ticker and calendar list views in Fantastical, and as a free app it’s a great option — especially if you use Exchange or Outlook calendars.

Moleskine Timepage

Moleskine Timepage is a beautiful calendar app with a nearly unmatched design. It also works great with Moleskine’s Actions app. However, Timepage’s subscription pricing is more expensive than Fantastical’s one-time purchase price and is high for Timepage’s feature-set.

Vantage Calendar

Vantage Calendar is a new app with a unique (and customizable) interface. Vantage is unique enough to catch your attention, but the UI will take some getting used to when compared to other calendar apps. The app is free to download, with a one-time in-app purchase of $9.99.

Google Calendar

The Google Calendar app is a solid choice if you primarily use Google Calendars, but even if you don’t, you can still use it as long as you have a Google account (you must sign in to enable the app to work). Once you’re signed in, you can enable the accounts on your device and view them. The app offers several views, including a list of your events with an optional month overview at the top, as well as a day, 3-day, week and month views. The app is free to download and use, and supports multiple account types.

Calendars 5

Another calendar app worth checking out is Calendars 5.

One of the biggest selling points of Calendars 5 over Fantastical 3 is that the former is not subscription-based. You don’t get nearly as much with Calendars 5, but if you are put off by the thought of subscription software, it’s a decent alternative. If just need a solid calendar app without the extras for you to work with that looks and feels the same across your iPhone and iPad, Calendars 5 is definitely worth your consideration.

Calendars 5 has several great view options: List view, day view, week view, and month view. Getting to these different views, however, requires a few taps and can be tedious.

With its own integrated task manager (which can sync with iCloud Reminders) and the ability to sync with Google Calendar on its own, Calendars 5 can stand alone from the iOS native Calendar and Reminders if you want it to.

Calendars 5 also offers some nice gestures, including a horizontal swipe to change between the day/week/month/or year in view, as well as drag and drop to move events around. Drag and drop is a handy feature for easily changing the time or date of events — just tap, hold, and drag.

The list view offers a unique “timeline” type list with icons on the left-hand side illustrating what type of event or reminder each item is. On the iPad, this is accompanied by a block calendar view on the right, which is a unique view to Calendars 5. The week and month views also show your events in block view, which we find to be useful for visualizing time in the day. The year view provides a great overview, with color coding for each date for how busy you are.

For entering events, Calendars 5 also offers natural language parsing. However, it is missing the visual cues of Fantastical. While you do see an animation when parsing is happening, it doesn’t quite have the impact of the Fantastical animations.

Calendars 5 makes it easier than ever to invite people or add locations to events. Using the same natural language parsing, the app suggests that you invite people that you mention and also looks up locations that you can add to the event. For example, if you type “Coffee with Joe at Starbucks at 2,” Calendars will suggest that you invite Joe to the event and will also show you a list of local Starbucks shops.

Wrap Up

Fantastical 3 is our pick for the best iPhone calendar app. A great design, great views of your calendar events, and superior natural language parsing for event and reminder entry keeps this app on our home screens.

Depending on the need, we have different apps on the mac. As someone who worked mostly with development, below are my indispensable apps. They are like suits to Tony Stark. Since I love open source apps, they have higher priority in the list.

Open source apps

iTerm 2 https://www.iterm2.com/

iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with macOS 10.10 or newer. iTerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted.

iTerm2 has good integration with tmux and supports Split Panes

Term2 allows you to divide a tab into many rectangular “panes”, each of which is a different terminal session. The shortcuts cmd-d and cmd-shift-d divide an existing session vertically or horizontally, respectively. You can navigate among split panes with cmd-opt-arrow or cmd-[ and cmd-]. You can “maximize” the current pane — hiding all others in that tab — with cmd-shift-enter. Pressing the shortcut again restores the hidden panes.

There’s the_silver_searcher with ag command to quickly search for files

oh-my-zsh https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

A delightful community-driven (with 1,200+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 200+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, php, python, etc), over 140 themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

I use z shell with oh-my-zsh plugins. I also use zsh-autocompletions to have autocompletion like fish shell and z to track and quickly navigate to the most used directories.

spectacle https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

Spectacle allows you to organize your windows without using a mouse.

With spectable, I can organise windows easily with just Cmd+Option+F or Cmd+Option+Left

insomnia https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia

Insomnia is a cross-platform REST client, built on top of Electron.

Regardless if you like electron.js apps or not. This is a great tool for testing REST requets

Visual Studio Code https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

VS Code is a new type of tool that combines the simplicity of a code editor with what developers need for their core edit-build-debug cycle. Code provides comprehensive editing and debugging support, an extensibility model, and lightweight integration with existing tools.

This seems to be the most popular for front end development, and many other things. There’s bunch of extensions that make the experience to a new level.

IconGenerator https://github.com/onmyway133/IconGenerator

Built by me. When developing iOS, Android and macOS applications, I need a quick way to generate icons in different sizes. You can simply drag the generated asset into Xcode and that’s it.

vmd https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/vmd

Preview markdown files in a separate window. Markdown is formatted exactly the same as on GitHub.

colorpicker https://github.com/Toinane/colorpicker

A mininal but complete colorpicker desktop app

I used to use Sip but I often get the problem of losing focus.

GifCapture https://github.com/onmyway133/GifCapture

I built this as a native macOS app to capture screen and save to gif file. It works like Licecap but open source. There’s also an open source tool called kap that is slick.

Itsycal https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal

Itsycal is a tiny calendar for your Mac’s menu bar.

The app is minimal and works very well. It can shows calendar for integrated accounts in the mac.

PushNotifications https://github.com/onmyway133/PushNotifications

I often need to test push notification to iOS and Android apps. And I want to support both certificate and key p8 authentication for Apple Push Notification service, so I built this tool.

Lyrics https://github.com/onmyway133/Lyrics

A menu bar app to show the lyric of the playing Spotify song

When I listen to some songs in Spotify, I want to see the lyrics too. The lyrics is fetched from https://genius.com/ and displayed in a wonderful UI.

gitify https://github.com/manosim/gitify

GitHub Notifications on your desktop.

I use this to get real time notification for issues and pull requests for projects on GitHub. I hope there is support for Bitbucket soon.

FinderGo https://github.com/onmyway133/FinderGo

FinderGo is both a native macOS app and a Finder extension. It has toolbar button that opens terminal right within Finder in the current directory. You can configure it to open either Terminal, iTerm2 or Hyper

Atom one dark theme

Best free calendar app toolbar for mac 2018 price

This is about theme. There is the very popular dracular themes, but I find it too strong for the eyes. I don’t use Atom, but I love its one dark UI. I used to maintain my own theme for Xcode called DarkSide but now I use xcode-one-dark for Xcode and Atom One Dark Theme for Visual Studio Code.

Best Free Calendar App Toolbar For Mac 2018 Torrent

I also use Fira Code font in Xcode, Visual Studio Code and Android Studio, which has beautiful ligatures.

Chrome extensions

I use Chrome for its speed and wonderful support for extensions. The extensions I made are github-chat to enable chat within GitHub and github-extended to see more pinned repositories.

There are also refined github, github-repo-size and octotree that are indispensable for me.

caprine https://github.com/sindresorhus/caprine

Caprine is an unofficial and privacy focused Facebook Messenger app with many useful features.

Close source and commercial apps

Sublime Text https://www.sublimetext.com/

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. You’ll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance.

Yahoo Toolbar For Mac

Sublime Text is simply fast and the editing experience is very good. I’ve used Atom but it is too slow.

Canon mf4770n printer driver download for mac. This is great if you work from your home, you can stay productive even at odd hours and not worry about disturbing the quiet in your house. The tiltable control panel will allow you to see and navigate through different screens with ease. The MF4770n offers the convenience of networking via an Ethernet connection and quick print and copy speeds.With the single touch of the quiet mode 9 button you can reduce the operational noise of the machine. Another feature that adds to the convenience of the machine are simple solution keys, effortless scans and eco-friendly copying options are at your fingertips.Increase your office's efficiency with print and copy speeds of up to 24 pages per minute 1 and have your first print ready to go when you are in less than 6 seconds 2.

Sublime Merge https://www.sublimemerge.com/

Meet a new Git client, from the makers of Sublime Text

Sublime Merge never lets me down. The source control app is simply very quick. I used SourceTree in the past, but it is very slow and had problem with authentication to Bitbucket and GitHub, and it halts very often for React Native apps, which has lots of node modules committed.

1 Password https://1password.com/

1Password remembers them all for you. Save your passwords and log in to sites with a single click. It’s that simple.

Everyone need strong and unique passwords these day. This tool is indispensable

Monosnap https://monosnap.com/welcome

Make screenshots. Draw on it. Shoot video and share your files. It’s fast, easy and free.

I haven’t found a good open source alternative, this is good in capturing screen or portion of the screen.

VLC https://www.videolan.org/index.nb.html

iTunes or Quick Time has problem with some video codecs. This app VLC can play all kinds of video types.

Xcode https://developer.apple.com/xcode/

Xcode is the go to editor for iOS developer. The current version is Xcode 10. From Xcode 8, plugins are not supported. The way to go is Xcode extensions.

I have developed XcodeColorSense2 to easily recognise hex colors, and XcodeWay to easily navigate to many places right from Xcode

Sketch https://www.sketchapp.com/

Sketch is a design toolkit built to help you create your best work — from your earliest ideas, through to final artwork.

Sketch is the most favorite design tool these days. There are many cool plugins for it. I use Sketch-Action and User Flows

Where to go from here

I hope you find some new tools to try. If you know other awesome tools, feel free to make a comment. Here are some more links to discover further

If you like this post, consider visiting my other articles and apps 🔥