Dot: The Menu Bar Calendar That’s Become My Main Calendar

Over time, I’ve gravitated towards a two-calendar system on my Mac because I’ve never found an app where both the desktop app and the menu bar version meet all my needs. That’s probably because my calendar use is a little backwards. I don’t have a lot of meetings each week; instead, my calendar is a mix of reminders, package deliveries, and a handful of work and family events. With just two or three entries each day, I’ve found myself managing events more and more often from a simple menu bar app, reserving my full calendar app for more involved event entry and planning.

On the desktop side, I’ve used Apple Calendar the most, but I’ve also used Fantastical and BusyCal for extended periods, ultimately landing on Notion Calendar. It isn’t perfect, but its Notion integration can be handy at times. On the menu bar side of the equation, I used Dato for many years. It’s an excellent app, but even it is a little more than I need, which is why I was excited to recently discover Dot.

Two different looks thanks to Dot’s many settings.

Dot is a menu bar-only Mac app that supports iCloud, Google, Outlook, and Exchange with a simple, modern design and lots of customization options. I’ll get to its many options shortly, but first, let’s take a quick tour of how I’ve set up Dot. Along the top toolbar are the number of events on my calendar for today, the day of the week and date, a gear icon for accessing settings, and a caret icon that hides the month view and expands the event list. That toolbar is followed by a bar graph showing how far through the year we are as well as a month view that includes dots showing the days on which I have events scheduled and a button for adding new events. The last two sections are comprised of a scrollable list of events and a space for clocks in two other time zones.

Navigating Dot is simple. You can arrow through the days in the month view, page through months with the buttons at the top of the section, and return to today by clicking the month and year label at the top of the view. As you move through the month, your event list updates to the day you’ve selected and the dates that follow. Events are clickable, revealing additional details and a three-dot ‘More’ menu for copying various details about an event.

Event creation (left) and the event-only list view (right).

Event creation includes all the usual details you’d expect with the exception that reminders are global and cannot be set on a per-event basis, which I’d like to see added in the future. Adding events also supports natural language like “tomorrow at 8 am,” “every Sunday,” and even “the third Thursday of every month.” Plus, Dot works with the major video conferencing services like Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Webex and collects links to meeting resources, such as Notion documents, from the event’s notes.

A unique feature of Dot that I love is the ability to mark a date on your calendar. Just right-click a date, give it a title and a color, and that’s it. The day will be overlaid with the accent color, and the title will appear on hover. It’s a simple feature, but it’s great for highlighting an important date coming up.

I appreciate that Dot provides a preview of what changing settings does to the app’s UI.

The app also supports:

pinning the calendar until it’s dismissed,

searching for events,

quickly jumping to a date by typing “F” and a date,

fast calendar selection with the “/” key,

the ability to hide days with no events from the event list,

keyboard shortcuts for toggling the calendar and joining meetings,

a menu bar countdown to your next event,

and more.

That’s a lot of options all neatly tucked away where they’re available but not visible unless you want them to be, which I appreciate.

So if you use a calendar app that doesn’t have a great menu bar app or live in your menu bar calendar more than your main calendar app like I do, give Dot a try. There’s a 14-day free trial, and at the moment, the app is just $9.99 during its launch window when you use the code LAUNCH, with an eventual planned price of $14.99.