Calendar

We've already heard from multiple sources that Apple's vice president of design, Jony Ive, has been working on making iOS flatter and more refined, but now he's also rumored to be working on brand new Mail and Calendar apps as well. It's not clear right now whether a complete revamp of such core personal information management software would be ready in time for iOS 7 this year, or for iOS 8 next year, but the focus sounds interesting. According to Bloomberg:

Horizon Calendar by Applause Code is an innovative calendar app that includes natural language parsing, a clean design, intuitive gestures, and forecasted weather associated with each of your events.

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Tempo is a new calendar app for iPhone that not only attempts to handle your appointments and schedule more elegantly, but also doubles as somewhat of a personal assistant. It achieves this by tying into several different account types such as your emails, contacts, and more. The more you use Tempo, the smarter it gets, and the more relevant the information presented to you will be.

The popular and totally awesome calendar app Fantastical for iPhone has been updated with a new setting that allows you to display only one day at a time in the event list. The default setting is an infinite list that shows all future events. A few bugs in Fantastical have also been addressed.

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Readdle has updated their popular Calendars app for iPhone and iPad, and renamed it Calendars+. That's because they're also introducing an all new, all free version under the original Calendars name.

Earlier this week, I compared the default views of 12 popular iPhone calendar apps, and since sometimes good things also come in bigger packages, now it's time for the iPad. No surprise here, but as with the 5 iPad podcast apps, 18 iPad weather apps, and 9 iPad Twitter apps, not all iPhone calendar apps have versions or interfaces for the iPad. We get 10 this time.

If you need to move a Calendar event or appointment around on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you can do it by tapping the event and editing it the old fashioned way. However, iOS also provides a quick and easy gesture shortcut to make it even faster and more visual.

Fantastical, the fantastically functional calendar app by Flexibits, has just been updated to version 1.1. I've been beta testing it for a while, and as clichéd as it sounds, it really does make the already great app even better.

I've compared the main screens of iPhone Twitter apps, weather apps, and podcast apps, and next on the agenda is calendar apps. While iOS contains a default calendar app, and many people find it affable enough, it never seemed to get as much high level Apple attention as some of the other core apps. Maybe that's why a plethora of canny developers and designers have managed to reverse-Sherlock (Moriarty?) Apple and put out good look, great working calendar apps that go above and beyond the default. For this piece, I'm taking a quick look at the standard view of 11 of them, including the built-in iOS Calendars app, for a total of 12.

Sunrise Calendar launched in the App Store this week to mixed buzz. It looks interesting but it only works with Google Calendar and requires -- requires -- you to login with Facebook before it will let you start using the app. That's an absolute show stopper for me. I don't need or want to login to a calendar app, and if I did, while Facebook would be a welcome option among many, I won't use any third-party app, not ever, where it's the only option. But that's not all...

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