Gadgetory

calendar apps have a tough job everyone needs one but everyone wants something different out of them I want a concise view of the day ahead but you might want a spaced out view of your week and someone else might want a super-dense view of their entire month so what's an app to do well some of them specialize but most try to offer something for everyone and the best of them do a great job presenting your schedule no matter how you want to do it there's no one knockout winner right now but there is one that have to lutely nails the basics whether you're on iPhone or Android that's Google Calendar I know I know it's a boring pic but Google Calendar is quick as a clean design has some small touches that really do elevated above the rest first let's talk views pretty much every calendar app has an agenda view day view week view and month view but few of them are as easy to read and navigate between as Google calendars you're almost never lost in here which is not something I can say for a lot of other calendar apps the other thing I love is adding new events Google Calendar makes it super easy by supporting natural language entry so I can just write lunch next Friday at 2:00 boots of Dan and I'm pretty much good to go you can also have reminders which will stay put on your calendar until you clear them and there's this neat goals feature that will automatically find time for regular tasks like workouts and cleaning Google automatically uses art and photos to identify your events and once you have a location in there you can just tap on it to jump over to maps and get directions there are a few downsides though right now Google calendar doesn't have a widget on iOS and most other calendar apps do Google also doesn't have interesting calendars you can add like sport schedules it doesn't integrate with other apps and doesn't have weather alerts or time to leave alerts most other apps don't have those things either but they are missed opportunities okay but there are some other really solid options depending on what you're looking for and on the iPhones are a lot of really interesting ones there's time page which is really gorgeous and maybe way too simple or there's calendars five which i think is fantastic especially if you need help respond to a bunch of event invitations one alternative that a lot of people love is fantastical fantastical has excellent natural language support maybe even better than Google's and it has a customizable widget and icon which is great for at a glance information the reason I don't think fantastical is for everyone is it's love it or hate it interface if you want density here you go it is a dense agenda view with a quick week or month bar at the top of the screen I absolutely can't read this but if you want a lot of information at once this is a great choice the alternatives on Android are really different and often kind of strange like this one what is it doing why are their circles what's happening a lot of calendar apps on Android go for density which i think is way too hard to read and others come off as twists on Google Calendar to varying degrees of success there is one that stands out though and that's digit Cal did you go stands out in a few different ways first it has a ton of view options so you can get a split agenda in month view a full-on month you even a full year view there's also built-in weather information up to two weeks out and for a price you can subscribe to interesting calendars so sports schedules TV schedules religious holidays and other things like that I also love that you can just tap on an event to get a quick preview of it it's really easy to read but as a whole I find digital a little bit harder to navigate in Google Calendar it also doesn't have natural language support for inputting events and you're going to want to pay $5 to remove all the built-in ads there's not a lot of money but it's not quite adding enough to sell me on the whole package the truth is there is isn't a lot of innovation in calendar apps these days there are a few core features and most apps do them pretty well so until there's an app out there that does something much better than the basics I'm going to stick with the one that does the basics the best iPhone or Android that's Google Calendar this tootsie rolls have been in there do you test rules age down drop so tough job are you kidding me no God darn it