Fantastical Adds Web-Based Scheduling Features

Speaking of Jason Snell, today he wrote about one of the best new app updates of the year so far, Fantastical 3.6 (which really could have been versioned 4.0):

Finding a common time when a group of people can meet has been a recurring theme of my life for a couple of decades now. Back in the old days, it was often finding common times for project meetings at work. For more than a decade, it has also included scheduling podcast episodes with a disparate group of panelists. And as an independent type person, I often need to schedule Zoom meetings with a random collection of people in different time zones with different schedules.

My calendar app has never really done this job well, so I’ve used a bunch of web-based tools to facilitate this work, most notably Doodle and (more recently) StrawPoll. As of last week, though, my calendar app does do this — because last week Flexibits announced Fantastical 3.6, an update to its subscription-based calendar app that adds a new web-based scheduler.

The new features work great. They do what Fantastical has always done — make even complex calendaring tasks easy and understandable. But they’re also an interesting marriage of excellent native apps and web-based services. Snell:

Fantastical (and its cousin contacts app, Cardhop) are bundled together in a subscription service called Flexibits Premium, and these additions show that Flexibits is getting comfortable implementing new features that span apps and the cloud to get the functionality that they want. And all these new features are covered by the regular Flexibits Premium subscription — as they should be, since getting the benefit of new features was a key part of the deal when Flexibits converted Fantastical to a subscription model.

The people you invite to collaborate on finding a good time for an event don’t need to be Flexibits Premium subscribers — in fact, they don’t even need to be Fantastical users. But for the organizer, this really does exemplify the benefits of a subscription model.

★ Tuesday, 15 February 2022