Fantastical is a calendar utility by Flexibits which we’ve reviewed back in May and have been using since then as a companion to Apple’s built-in calendar application for the Mac. Fantastical, in fact, isn’t a full-featured calendar app – rather, it’s a “calendar assistant” that enables users to quickly add a new entry to all kinds of supported calendar protocols (including Google Calendar and Entourage) with a natural language input system. Instead of interacting with menus and checkboxes to set up a new meeting at a specific location, Fantastical lets you write down things like “Lunch with Cody tomorrow at Cafeteria from 1 PM to 3 PM” and have a new event created in your default calendar. And because Fantastical has direct access to these calendars, you can forget about leaving iCal open and just use Fantastical’s (beautiful) window from the menubar.
A new version of Fantastical was released today and, alongside improvements to event creation, parsing engine and date handling, it sports brand new BusyCal integration to create events directly into the popular third-party calendar for OS X. BusyCal is a calendar and to-do list manager for Mac geared towards power users with features such as Bonjour and LAN sync, multi-user editing, list view and various security features. With Fantastical 1.0.2, events can do directly into BusyCal without going through iCal first (though the devs note calendars still must be added to iCal). Version 1.0.2 also brings a new shortcut to bring an invitee pop-up for contacts recognized in your Address Book, and arrow keys integration to switch between calendar weeks.
Fantastical is simple and powerful at the same time, with a gorgeous user interface design that makes it very intuitive to add events to your calendars (and calendar apps) with a few keystrokes. You can download Fantastical at $19.99 on the App Store.
