Since Fantastical is the App of the Month, I’ve put it head to head against the free competition. Apple’s own Calendar app.

I cover widgets, interface, functionality and of course cost.

Widgets

The Fantastical widgets make the subscription almost worth it all on their own. Apple’s own widgets are just…bad. Really bad. They are not interactive and are cluttered, often not showing important events and tasks on the smaller widgets, and the larger iPad widget is a joke of blank space.

One of the main fantastical features that can make widgets even better is calendar sets.

If you only want to see a select few calendars of reminders lists on the widget vs the app you can do so. It is an easy way to cleanup the widgets but also a great way to focus in and do long term planning with just a handful of events rather than a cluttered calendar that has everything on it.

Moving between sets is a simple shortcut or just a few taps in the app, compared to toggling each and every calendar in Apple Calendar, which can become tedious and is a waste of time.

Interface

There is nothing wrong with the Apple Calendar interface, but the Fantastical UI is objectively a better design. It works the way a calendar app should and is easy to navigate.

I love the day ticker view and the way you can scroll through all of the days in the list below, rather than having to tap the day and only seeing one day at a time like in Apple calendar.

Functionality

Both calendars have time to leave notifications which is important to me.

Fantastical has natural language input. This makes adding calendar events…natural. You just type it in as you would speak it, “doctors appointment thursday 10am at location” and the keywords get parsed out such that you just click create and boom! It’s on your calendar.

Fantastical was the only way to get to-dos and calendar in the same app for a long time. I was a todoist user and Fantastical integrates directly with it. Apple calendar has now added reminders into the calendar app, which is a welcome change that makes apple calendar more competitive on this front.

Saturday this weekend I was a guest on a podcast for the first time!

Tom and Jeff of the Basic AF podcast were nice enough to host me. We talk calendars, notes apps, AI and more. The episode should be out February 17. Their show page is linked here: Basic AF: A (mostly) tech podcast

You can find them on all major podcast platforms.

I’m sure it will be weird hearing myself on a podcast that I haven’t produced for the first time but tune in and listen so the episode does well and they invite me back! It turns out I could talk about tech for hours, who would have thought?

Brooks Glycerin Max First Miles is out now!

An unexpected max stack release that stole the long run shoe spot in my rotation.

I did a first run in the Superblast 2 and I think I still like the Glycerin Max better! Am I getting old or did Brooks knock it out of the park with this release?!

Let Down by the Nike Pegasus Premium

I am a Nike shareholder. Their stock has been hurting lately and when you look at their running shoe lineup compared to competitors, it is really no surprise why.

Nike has lost its original running shoe DNA and stagnated.

I had high hopes for the Pegasus Premium. A new design, something interesting, a first, full length sculpted Air unit, their premium ZoomX foam and some React in the heel as well.

What a let down!

The shoe does feel extremely bouncy which is cool, but alas the Nike fit is still horrible. This shoe was far too narrow for me. The lacing system is not good with many pressure points.

I get the impression that they were trying to do too much instead of just making a shoe that many people would want to run in.

Unfortunately for me, Nike needs to go back to the drawing board, again. They still don’t have a daily trainer I would be interested in and their race day shoes, Streakfly, Vaporfly and Alphafly all fit me like garbage with narrow toe boxes and a severe lack of stability.

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