by There’s a trend these days toward smart calendars. No longer is it enough to just keep track of our appointments; apps like Tempo and Horizon combine our important dates with weather forecasts, contacts, and emails, and even Apple is getting into the act with directions and traffic reports in iOS 7. On the surface, Cal – the first in a planned suite of productivity apps from the creators of Any.Do – seems too simple to compete with this new class of calendar. But while it won’t blow you away with powerful features, its slick interface and attention to detail show that smarts aren’t just about artificial intelligence.
Like Any.Do, Cal doesn’t clutter the screen with any unnecessary ornamentation. There’s something of an iOS 7-inspired aesthetic at work here, with thin fonts, splashes of red, and a clean, white backdrop. Underneath it all, Cal displays a different Tumblr photo on each day (with personalized themes), but depending on how many appointments you have, you might not see much of it. There are just two views – month and week – and swiping up or down expands or contracts the calendar accordingly. Along with telling you what’s happening next in your life, Cal fills in the larger spaces between appointments with blocks of “Free time,” as if to remind you to stop and smell the roses.
Cal uses slick animations to liven up the otherwise dull process of inputting events. By forgoing the static series of fields common to even the smartest of calendars, Cal puts a greater emphasis on what you’re doing and with whom. Fantastical’s natural language engine is still the gold standard, but Cal has an uncanny ability to spot people you know, sorting through them as you type so you can quickly invite them (or send a reminder message later). Locations work in a similar way, and you can also add notes and set up to three alerts.
If there’s a killer feature in Cal, it’s the built-in integration with Any.Do. Tapping the “task” button quickly sends you to the popular productivity app, where everything you type is added to the appropriate date in Cal. It’s slick and very useful, though we wish the link worked both ways; once we were done with Any.Do, we had to find our own way back to Cal.
We experienced a strange bug that set random dates for our alerts, and we missed seeing some indicator of our future events. The Any.Do integration is great, but we wish we could edit tasks inside the app, and we’d really like to see Cal gain its companion’s built-in voice commands in a future update.
The bottom line. There are more intelligent calendars out there, but Cal is smart in all the right ways.
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