I love the start of a new year because it is a great time to revamp your productivity workflow. You can re-evaluate what tools you use and even buy new apps completely free of guilt. It is no secret that the cornerstone of any good system is the calendar but it can be difficult to force yourself to create calendar events on a regular basis. Well, the folks behind QuickCal have just released a great update to get you back in the routine of managing your calendar.

One major improvement in QuickCal 3.1 is the re-written recognition engine that the app uses to understand natural language input. QuickCal has no structured syntax for adding events and reminders which actually makes adding items extremely flexible. When typing in the event you no longer have to start with the event title, you actually have the option of starting with a time, duration, location, or title and QuickCal will almost always get it right. I have also noticed a dramatic improvement in QuickCal’s ability to correctly parse out event locations which is something I have had trouble with in previous versions. Regardless of the order in which you type out the information, QuickCal does an excellent job figuring out the details for you. Adding events to your calendar without worrying about correct syntax is incredibly powerful. The only way QuickCal could get any faster at creating calendar events is if it actually finished sentences for you.

oh, wait…

Have I mentioned their new autocomplete feature? Autocomplete does exactly what you expect it to do. As you are typing common words, QuickCal gives you suggestions of words it thinks you might be typing. To accept the autocompletion you can just hit the tab key and continue on typing. It will even pickup on your most frequently used words and auto-suggest them in the future. After only 3 or 4 reminders relating to my wife Leslie, QuickCal was finishing her name for me. It is awesome. In fact, I am finding it so useful that I am not sure how I had ever used QuickCal without this feature.

Perhaps the greatest improvement to QuickCal is its integration with iCloud Reminders. A reminder is now added to your default Reminders list and shows up in the iOS 5 Reminders app. If the reminder has a date or time then an alarm is also created. This alone is a neat feature but it wasn’t enough to pry me away from the Alfred extension I had created to quickly add simple iOS 5 Reminders. Although as I continued to use the new version of QuickCal, I realized that I could also add items to other lists by simply typing the name of the list. For example, my wife and I share a Groceries list. If I just start typing Gro… it suggests switching to my Groceries list so I can add an item to it. In true QuickCal fashion it does so very intuitively and without effort. It is a great feature that truly increases my dependency on QuickCal. The only drawback is still having to open iCal to trigger an iCloud sync. When CalDAV is supported and I no longer need that extra step, QuickCal will be my ideal iCal replacement.

Check out QuickCal 3.1 and all of its new features on the Mac App Store.

Back in May I reviewed QuickCal for Mac, an iCal add-on that, through a very straightforward interface, allowed you to create new events in iCal using “natural language input”. With a combination of keyboard shortcuts and direct iCal integration, QuickCal let you write down events in plain English (example: Lunch with Cody tomorrow at Italian restaurant), and have them automatically formatted as new entries in iCal, which would then sync them to a MobileMe or online service of choice. Alternatively, QuickCal also featured native Google Calendar support, so events didn’t have to go through iCal first to be synced online. With a clean menubar list of upcoming events, support for to-dos and smart reminders, I was quite impressed by QuickCal as an iCal add-on for desktop users.

With the 3.0 update released today, QuickCal adds a completely redesigned UI, a new dynamic dock icon, and a series of improvements throughout the interface. As with the previous version, QuickCal can be invoked by pressing a keyboard shortcut (mine is Control+Shift+Q), which will open a floating panel (think OmniFocus’ quick entry/Alfred/NotifyMe) to start writing down a future event. Focus is immediately placed on the text cursor; the new QuickCal entry box design is nice to look at, and it retains the underlying simplicity of the older versions. As you type, text is automatically formatted to reflect an event’s data points like date, location, and duration. For instance, “Meet with Chris at Apple Store, Viterbo tomorrow from 5 to 6″ will result in an event called “Meet with Cris”, with location, date and duration fields automatically filled in. This hasn’t changed from the old QuickCal.

QuickCal 3.0 has a beautiful dock icon with a dynamic date on it (like iCal), although unfortunately, due to Apple’s rules with menubar apps and Lion, you’ll have to manually drag it from Launchpad or the Applications folder onto your dock if you want to see it. Once it’s there, you’ll be able to click on it to open the quick entry panel, and drop text on it as well. If you don’t want to use QuickCal’s own quick entry box, you can make its natural language input work with popular application launchers such as Alfred and LaunchBar.

Other features of QuickCal 2.0 have been maintained and refined in this 3.0 release. The app can still create to-dos in a specific calendar with the “todo” prefix — this works nicely with iCal’s Reminders in Lion. QuickCal also provides a summary of upcoming events and to-dos in the menubar, and you can play around with the app’s preferences to tweak sorting options, days to show, and completed events. You can set a default calendar for new events and to-dos, enable Google Calendar sync in the second tab of the Preferences, and, as with version 2.0, activate automatic conflict resolution, so the app will turn red if you’re creating an event that’s overlapping an existing one.

One of my favorite features of QuickCal 2.0 has been ported over to 3.0, and that’s Smart Reminders. With this functionality, you can set the app to automatically apply certain alarms for events that are a day, week, or month away. This way you’ll always have a reminder available and different depending on the kind of event you’re assigning it to.

QuickCal 3.0 comes with native BusyCal support, but I haven’t been able to test this. I’ve only tested the app with MobileMe and iCloud calendars, and I’ve noticed QuickCal still isn’t completely independent from Apple’s iCal in that it requires iCal to be open to sync events to the cloud. With iCal closed but QuickCal running, new events will be saved in QuickCal, but they’ll only be synced after you launch iCal. Another app with natural language input for events, Fantastical, comes at a higher price on the App Store ($14.99), but it syncs events immediately to the cloud thanks to native CalDAV sync support.

QuickCal 3.0 is a simple and effective companion for iCal, now with a nicer UI. I prefer to call the app an add-on, rather than a mini-calendar replacement, as it requires iCal to be open to sync events to iCloud/MobileMe, and it can’t live on its own unless you’re a Google Calendar user. Natural language input is certainly more reliable than iCal’s in Lion, and the interface is unobtrusive enough to be there to assist you, but get out of the way as you don’t need it. If you’re an iCal user and you’re looking for a quicker way to enter events in plain English, QuickCal is only $2.99 on the App Store (a free 14-day trial is available on QuickCal’s website).
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Last night I reviewed QuickCal for Mac, a menubar utility that works in conjunction with the desktop iCal to provide a simple way to add new events to your calendars using plain English as natural language input. Unlike Fantastical, QuickCal can’t sync back to any calendar in the cloud if iCal isn’t running because of its lack of native CalDAV support (though it’s got built-in Google Calendar integration), but still it offers a cheap and easy to use way to create new events without having to deal with iCal’s menus, popups, and checkboxes. As I mentioned in my review, QuickCal also comes with an iPhone counterpart called QuickCal Mobile that, just like the Mac version, allows you to quickly jot down events using nothing but plain English.

QuickCal Mobile for iPhone may look like a stripped down version of the Mac app, but I was surprised to see it’s actually the same app, only integrated with iOS standard calendar features. This means events displayed in a list or monthly view can be edited and deleted with the same interface of Calendar.app for iPhone, and everything from alerts to location and availability status can be modified in-app without launching Apple’s Calendar. QuickCal Mobile recognizes all calendars already configured out of the box, allows you to specify a default one and comes with the same Smart Reminders functionality of QuickCal for Mac — you can set a default reminder, one for events that are weeks away, and another one for things you’ll have to take care of in the next months. The app’s icon badge can visualize the current day of the month, or you can disable it and enjoy the icon on your homescreen with no red badge.

QuickCal Mobile’s biggest feature is obviously support for natural language input, and I was pleased to see it works just like on the Mac. You fire up the app, start typing in a single text entry field, and QuickCal will recognize your words as values for a new calendar event. It’s really fast and results update as you type — again, like on the Mac. At this point, I wish QuickCal would also run natively on my iPad — most of the times I check on my calendar from the tablet, and being able to quickly enter events there would be nice.

QuickCal Mobile is available at $0.99 on the App Store, and if you’re fan of the Mac application you should definitely give it a try. The app won’t replace your Week Calendar or Calvetica, but it’s a very convenient way to add events in seconds.

When I reviewed Fantastical, a new calendar utility by Flexibits that lives in the OS X menubar, I was impressed by the design of the app and the support for natural language input, a feature that allows you to write down your calendar events quickly using nothing but plain English — say you have a meeting tomorrow at your local coffee shop, with Fantastical you don’t need to click on checkboxes and date fields to get your new event set up. You can just write “meeting at coffee shop tomorrow at 5.30 PM”, and Fantastical will know how to handle it. After my Fantastical review, several readers pointed out in the comments and via Twitter that QuickCal, another calendar app that works from the menubar, does more or less the same things of Fantastical, only with a more simple and standard UI and at $0.99 in the Mac App Store, as opposed to Fantastical’s $14.99 introductory price. Because I’m a sucker for new software I love to play with and I care about my readers’ app recommendations, I decided to download QuickCal for Mac and take it for a spin. There’s also an iPhone version available, but after the break I will take a look at QuickCal for Mac — the review of the iPhone version will follow later this week.

Surprisingly, QuickCal works a lot like Fantastical. That is not to say the Fantastical developers “copied” the main features of QuickCal — I’m just surprised I didn’t know about this app before. QuickCal is indeed very similar to Fantastical in how it enables you to write down events using simple, plain English, and it’s got some additional functionalities that integrate the app with iCal, or directly with Google Calendar’s online interface. QuickCal is also fundamentally different from Fantastical in how it lets you start adding a new event, and the design of the event list in the menubar has a simpler look that, unlike Flexibits’ app, doesn’t embed a full monthly calendar, bur rather only shows upcoming events in a vertical list. Both apps have some features in common, but the implementation is ultimately different and exclusive to each one of them. (more…)