What you need to know
- Popular calendar app Calendars has a new update.
- It adds support for adding video call details to meetings.
- You can see a teammate's availability and more.
Apple's own Calendar app has its uses but if you want to really take control of your time you need something a bit more powerful. Calendars by Readdle is one option and it's a popular one at that. It's getting stronger all the time as well, with a new update adding video calling features and more.
The headline addition is the ability to add video call details right into a meeting entry within Calendars. Zoom, Google Hangouts, and GoToMeeting are all supported and a call is never more than a tap away.
Calendars now brings that much-needed sanity and organization to your team calls. While creating an event, you can generate a Zoom, Google Hangouts, or GoToMeeting call link right from Calendars. The link will be available in the event details, so all the participants will have handy access to it from their calendars. With no more last-minute searches for links, your meetings will always start on time.
Users can also now see their teammates' availability and even add their schedules to their own calendar. That sounds horrific to me, but I can imagine it makes tons of sense if you have a proper job and work with lots of different people.
Besides saving you time on organizing meetings, this option can help you avoid distractions throughout the day. Let's say you've calendar-blocked time from 1 to 3 PM for deep work. Then, your colleague who subscribed to your calendar won't bother you with calls or messages during this time as they see you're busy.
Other improvements include the arrival of notifications ensuring you'll never miss a meeting invite as well as an improved workflow for creating new calendar events. Readdle is even keeping its conferencing tool integration free for everyone – for now at least – to help users work remotely.
Conferencing tools integration is a premium feature, but given the circumstances, we decided to make it free for everybody. Once the quarantine is over, this feature will become part of the Premium plan in Calendars. If before that time you used conference calls integration at least once, you'll keep it for free forever.
The updated Calendars can be downloaded from the App Store (opens in new tab) for free with in-app purchases available.
