Fantastical at 15

Has a lot of features, I don't personally need any of them.

Years ago I asked their support to fix the fact that no matter how tall or short you make the window, stupid ugly vertical scrollbars are always present. Something about how they do the layout, probably some ui container doesn't properly fit in another container. Years later they haven't fixed it. Psssss me off on principle, a stupid ugly wrong thing that everyone can see wasn't worth their time to fix even years later, no, just focus on adding another 200 features almost no one needs.

@ER: A lot of people don't even bother to paint the _front_ of the cabinet.

I don’t need any of the extra features. The only reason I pay for it is to get that stupid, ugly, dumb “demo” watermark off the menubar calendar, which is the only thing I use. And Cardhop is superfluous for me.

So, congrats, Flexibits. Your rent-seeking behavior was nearly ahead of its time. Now it’s just par for the course.

Tom, Does Itsycal not do what you need? https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

It’s quite curious to me seeing the multiple opinions that are less than stellar about Fantastical. I absolutely love it. Far better interface than Apple calendar. Fills in several shortfalls of managing various Outlook calendars that the native Outlook app falls short on— especially calendars for meeting rooms that I manage. I understand how some people think of Cardhop as superfluous, but it comes with the Fantastical subscription, and the celebrations page is extremely handy to me.

"It’s quite curious to me seeing the multiple opinions that are less than stellar about Fantastical"

I think people are upset because they want something between Calendar and Fantastical. Like a non-shitty version of Calendar that doesn't require a subscription. It feels bad to be forced into yet another fricken subscription just to get a working Calendar app.

Of course, BusyCal exists.

"I think people are upset because they want something between Calendar and Fantastical."

This is frustrating indeed. But why be mad at Flexibits? Surely they are free to build whatever they want. If their product is not for you, don't use it.

If the menubar component is all you need, there's a plethora of options, such as Dato (https://sindresorhus.com/dato) or Dot (https://www.trydot.app). Personally, I've settled for Itsycal.

Fantastical offers the only Reminders integration that works the way I like. I stayed on Fantastical 2 for a while. The current version is fine without the extra features, but Flexibits sees fit to put a dickpanel clearly stating "demo" unless you pay the subscription. Obviously, this has the intended effect of draining more money from people's wallets... but let's not pretend there's anything noble in their business model now.

I recently started using Fantastical 3, the natural language event creation feature alone was worth it to me. I also find great value in Cardhop's ease of editing my contacts.

Software is a business, people need money. Nobility doesn't pay the bills.

Some good alternative suggestions thanks.

Itsycal - no natural language event creation, still have to click on dumb individual fields to create. Not nice for this reason.

Dato - latest version only runs on the worst OS Apple has ever released, of course it's Liquid Ass, which I won't downgrade to.

Dot - usable, very customizable, with natural language event creation. No way to customize font or font size in the menubar which makes it look out of place, but icon-only works even though the border around the icon is too light (non-standard) compared to other menubar items.

@Dan: Speaking for myself, a lot of the frustration stems from Fantastical being great before they switched to subscriptions in January 2020. I've been paying them ever since to have a non-broken calendar on my Apple devices and I don't believe that they have added a single feature that is worth it to me to pay for.

Natural language event creation is my sticking point, and I’ve tried them all. Calendar 366 II got the closest IMO, but it was still full of huge annoyance’s and only really worked a fraction of the time. Fantastical just works. To the degree that I’m paying $57 a year for it despite how angry I get every time I think about that.

Unrelated: iOS autocorrect inserted that apostrophe in “annoyances” and I’m leaving it there to demonstrate just how brain-dead it has become.