By John Gruber
Finalist Day Planner:
Made for your Dock
My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners — that (with permission) pulls in your calendars, reminders, and health data. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps you finish them.”
Finalist first sponsored DF back in December, and I wrote quite a bit about it then. You should read that post. I’ve continued using Finalist, day in, day out, since then. It’s open on my Mac and on my first iPhone home screen. I’m even on the TestFlight beta list, using new builds as Radic releases them. Finalist was good enough back in December that I started relying it, and it’s gotten even better in the three months since. It’s a great app, period, but it’s really fun to use an app that is getting better so quickly. Radic is cooking with gas. It’s just so obvious, just using it, that Finalist is his own dream app for daily productivity. Here’s a fun one-minute video showing what’s new in version 3.6.
Recent features include subtasks, calendar bookmarks, HealthKit data in Finalist’s journal, and a spoken daily briefing you can trigger from your Lock Screen. You can (and I do) run Finalist alongside the apps you already use. E.g., Finalist hasn’t replaced Fantastical for me — they just work great together because they both show me the same calendar events. Same goes for Apple Reminders. If you took a look back in December, you should check out what’s new. If you haven’t tried Finalist yet, you definitely should. Free trial from the App Store, with both subscription pricing and a one-time lifetime purchase.
★ Sunday, 15 March 2026