Fantastical for Windows — A Glass of Ice Water for Calendar Users in Hell

Flexibits:

We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you. [...]

The best news is that Fantastical for Windows is included in your Flexibits Premium subscription so there are NO extra purchases required!

All the main Fantastical features are there, including the Mini Window with which I pretty much live my calendaring life. On the Mac, the Mini Window lives in the menu bar; on Windows, the system tray.

Flexibits took a lot of arrows in their back when they switched from traditional per-major-version purchasing to subscription-only, but they promised at the time that the predictable, steady revenue from subscriptions would enable them to continue adding value to a Flexibits subscription over time. That started when they added Cardhop, a terrific Mac and iOS contact management app. Now it includes a full-fledged native Windows version of Fantastical.

I’m not sure which is more surprising in this week’s news from first-rate indie Mac apps — Pixelmator getting acquired by Apple, or Fantastical shipping for Windows. I’m trying to think of a similar app — a serious Mac-assed Mac app that eventually was ported to Windows — and I’m coming up empty. It just doesn’t happen. I might go all the way back to Apple bringing iTunes to Windows. Or maybe Instagram expanding to Android after a long initial stretch as iPhone-only.

But even iTunes was oft-criticized by Windows users for lack of adherence to Windows idioms. Especially as the years went on, it seemed like iTunes was used begrudgingly by Windows users (who needed to use it for syncing music, media, and data with their iPods, and later, iPhones), not happily. But the reaction to Fantastical seems overwhelmingly positive from the PC media:

★ Friday, 1 November 2024