Week Calendar has always been a calendar app for power users. I remember taking my first look at the iPhone version in March 2011, calling it a “powerful iCal alternative for iPhone”; two months later, I covered the release of the iPad client, which was then given a new theme to better differentiate it from Apple's own Calendar app.¹ After a long absence on the App Store, Week Calendar for iPad is back today as Week Calendar HD, which I have been testing for the past few months.

Just like its predecessors, Week Calendar is a calendar app for power users. You will find dozens of options and settings to tweak, perhaps even too many if you don't like the idea of tweaking every font size, calendar behavior, or menu to your liking. The compromise of using a feature-rich app as Week Calendar is that there is an initial learning curve – not too steep, but definitely something worth keeping in mind if you want to get the most out of the app.

Therefore, instead of listing every single feature in detail, I'll try to focus on the ones that I have been using on a daily basis.²

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Week Calendar HD is an excellent replacement for Apple’s own Calendar application I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago, when the app made the transition from the iPhone to the tablet’s larger screen. The first version of Week Calendar HD was a solid release, but left many surprised because of its skin that reminded of Apple’s app and, more importantly, of the theme the company implemented in iCal’s upcoming Lion version. Either because Apple called or because the developer realized a calendar application doesn’t need to look like a real-life calendar to be useful, the new version of Week Calendar HD changes the default skin to black leather and introduces a new “Modern” theme that gets rid of the leather-ish background altogether and looks gorgeous on the iPad.

Version 1.1 also comes with several bug fixes (particularly appreciated is the better handling of overlapping events, and the new event popup no longer disappearing) and enhancements to the settings to enable you to further customize the calendar experience throughout all your configured accounts. Custom calendar colors can now be synchronized across devices running Week Calendar with a new option in the settings; it’s now possible to only show daytime hours (very welcome change, as I don’t care about displaying hours I’m not going to be available anyway) and you can set up custom recurring intervals like “every 17 days.” The day view got some improvements too, as it can be swiped to navigate; last, the month view (which I love) got the possibility to hide time of events and change the font size. I’m not sure why events from my OmniFocus Reminders subscribed calendar still look weird in Week Calendar, but I’m pretty sure I’ll figure something out not that font options are available.

Week Calendar HD is a powerful calendar application for iPad, now with a beautiful modern skin, less leather and more settings. Get it here.

When I first reviewed Week Calendar for iPhone in March, I called it a powerful alternative to Apple’s standard calendar app for iOS devices. It’s not that Apple’s Calendar.app lacks basic functionalities or is utterly broken: in fact, I think Calendar is more than fine for most users. But if you’re willing to get the most out of your MobileMe, Google Calendar, Exchange or CalDAV calendars, UtiliTap’s application is the full-featured alternative to install on an iPhone. And today, you’ll be able to enjoy Week Calendar on the iPad as well, thanks to an “HD” counterpart that’s just been approved and is now available at $2.99 in the App Store.

Week Calendar HD has all the features from the iPhone version, only on a bigger screen and with visual cues from Lion’s calendar app. The difference between the iPad’s native Calendar and Week Calendar HD is very subtle, but Week Calendar implements a leather background and bits of torn paper in a way that’s more reminiscent of Lion than Apple’s own app. Clearly some people are going to hate this choice if they were looking for a cleaner UI as seen on the iPhone, and perhaps the developers will revise their decision. I don’t know, but right now this is what you get. And, more importantly, what matters is that Week Calendar still outpaces Apple’s calendar solution when it comes down to views, gestures, copy & paste support or mere customization of the calendar. Week Calendar’s biggest advantage over Apple’s cal is support for multitouch with copy & paste, possibility to add a new event with tap & hold, easy resizing of events and pinch to personalize the selected view. You can tap and hold an existing event to move it around and change its start and end date; you can “cut” an event and paste it somewhere else; you can access an event’s info panel with a single tap, rather than having to tap the Edit button like in Apple’s calendar. Again, this works like the iPhone version but it’s been ported successfully to the iPad with the use of popovers and bigger real screen estate. From the Event Details panel, like on Week Cal for iPhone, you can set an alert, availability status, custom color, or find your away around four buttons that allow you to share an event, print it, email it or add it to the template list. Week Calendar, in fact, can turn any event into a template to use again in the future. Notes, invitees and local contacts can be attached to an event, too.

The selection of settings is equally impressive. You can turn on time zone support and specify when the week or weekend start,  manage new events’ default preferences and the aforementioned templates (these will save you a lot of time), customize standard colors to assign a color by default to events that meet certain title criteria. There’s more: you can activate TextExpander integration (save even more time), turn off drag & drop entirely, completely overhaul the way the app displays days and weeks. For instance, you can change font sizes, enable out-of-view indicators, tell the app when a day starts and ends. Anything else is just Week Calendar for iPhone, running on the iPad with a new UI: lots of features, yet easy to use.

If you’re a calendar nerd, Week Calendar HD for iPad is a dream come true. It’s got all the customization options you’ve always wanted from the tablet’s calendar app, plus a design consistent with Apple’s recent standards and tons of gestures to simplify navigation. Get it here at $2.99.

In the past months, I’ve taken a look at different calendar applications for the iPhone and iPad that aim at bringing more functionalities (either through particular interface approaches, extended Google Calendar support, or other features) to a device’s built-in calendar software from Apple. The iOS calendar app, a tiny version of iCal for the desktop, is fast and elegant and works just fine for most users, but sometimes you want or need more from a mobile calendar or agenda. For instance, the possibility to have more views available (rather than the List, Day and Month ones designed by Apple) or “do more” with events and reminders. And while I know most of MacStories readers are huge fans of Calvetica and Cloud Calendar for the iPhone and iPad, respectively, I’m pretty sure some of you have been looking for a slightly more “powerful” or, dare I say, “geeky” alternative to Calendar.app. If so, meet Week Calendar.

The name says it all: Week Calendar’s biggest feature is the weekly view that’s the focus of the entire experience and undoubtedly something that Apple’s calendar app really lacks. In the app’s weekly view you can pinch & zoom vertically or horizontally to show / hide hours and days, double-tap to focus on a specific event or rotate to landscape mode to gain an even broader view. Tapping on the top toolbar allows you to select a date to jump to, whilst selecting an event opens a desktop-like popup with related information. Tap on the popup, and you get to another screen with all the details you’ve entered and buttons to share, print (that’s right, AirPrint) or create a template off the event itself. You can edit an event at any time, and even display the assigned location on a map. Something that I really like about Week Calendar (well, weekly view aside): you can link contacts from the Address Book to an event. Like I said, everything’s pretty full-featured to offer a wide array of options and choices.

“Choices” seems to be a prerogative of Week Calendar: from the main screen, an iPad-like popover lets you switch between 7 different views: List + Search, Day, Week, Month, Year, Agenda, and Today. The “Go to a Day” shortcut lets you manually enter a date to open. Switching between sections and views felt fast and highly responsive to me, although I have to say I’ve only configured the app with two calendars: my personal one, and US Holidays. The app comes with this kind of optional, built-in subscriptions that you can activate from the Settings. Speaking of which, there’s a lot of stuff to choose from in there: from Time Zone support and “Week starts at” to an auto-coloring system for events with a specific title, you can stay assured the option you’re looking for has been implemented in Week Calendar. I can see how many will prefer the simplicity of an app like Calvetica, but sometimes an application for “nerds & power users” is more than welcome. Other features of Week Calendar that impressed me for the quality of the implementation were fullscreen support (you can activate it with a single / double tap and choose what UI elements to hide), possibility to cut and drag & drop events in any view for easy re-arrangement and TextExpander integration.

Week Calendar is an app that needs to be used for weeks — even months — to be fully appreciated. There’s so much stuff to play with, configure and customize it’s not really easy to fit everything into a single article — plus, I believe all these options have the added value of turning the app into a completely different experience depending on how you use calendars. So, head over the App Store now and buy Week Calendar 3.0 — at $1.99 it’s possibly the most “serious” calendar app for iPhone I’ve seen so far. (more…)