Trying Out Apples Stock Apps
By: Paul Alvarez
Tags: Gadgets, Apps, Review, Technology, Apple

Calendar vs Fantastical

When it comes to my Calendar I will be completely honest and say that if Fantastical went away tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t be that upset. Not that Fantastical isn’t great and I do prefer it over the Calendar app overall.

When I got my iPhone 11 Pro last year I decided to setup it up as a new phone and not restoring from a backup. I then took my time in installing apps back on my phone and one of those apps I didn’t reinstall right away was Fantastical, I used the Calendar app for awhile not really caring that it didn’t have some of the features Fantastical provides.

But then it was something I either heard on Connected or Mac Power Users that made me realize how much I missed the natural language typing of an event allowing you to have every detail of the event setup without the need of flipping any toggles or using scroll wheels. In one sentence I could add an event on a day, at a specific time frame, and on the exact calendar I wanted.

Besides the natural language component the other thing I really love about Fantastical compared to the Calendar app is the views that it provides. Like the screenshot I am showing above, I love the ability to see an entire month then scroll through my event below telling me any events in that month or any upcoming months, allowing the month to change as I scroll to the next months events.

The design is also a little more polished, I know I sound like a broken record here, but I do love and appreciate Apple’s minimalist design aesthetics. I think something that these third party apps are showing is that you can still have a minimalist design but it still be functional, I feel sometimes Apple’s apps falls more on the side of design than function and think that could be the reason I don’t find myself using them.

Outlook vs Mail

I, like many others, have tried a variety of different mail apps on my iPhone, iPad, and even Mac. But every time I do I end up back in the stock Mail app. The main reason I do this is losing emails. Some of these apps provide additional filtering which throws some of my mail into Trash or Junk without me realizing it.

I currently have an iCloud, Gmail, and Techuisite email address that I use for all different reason. iCloud is used for more personal things like financial or family uses, my Techuisite account is for more “business” related needs for my writing, and everything else goes to Gmail — and I mean everything. Every newsletter, random website that I need to create a required account for that I will never use again, or an email to just give out for me to random people that need to contact me that are not that close.

The reason I treat Gmail this way is because I use a service called Sanebox to help me filter and remove any emails I no longer want to receive or block. It provides an additional filter than just the Spam one that Google provides and puts them in a SaneLater folder for me to go through and either allow to come to my Inbox or move it to the SaneBlackHole where I will never see it again.

All that being said, I have a system already that lets me filter my emails and allows me to see the things that I need to see flow through each email address. So for a email client, I just need a place for all those emails to come through. For the most part Mail has always provided that to me without fail.

Other email clients like Outlook or Airmail I feel they try to provide a different experience with email that I just don’t find useful. For instance, Outlook has a Focused and Other toggle in the app. This is supposed to provide you a way to see the emails you must see instead of seeing all of them at once.

On paper this seems like a good idea. A lot of times emails that you actually need to get to quickly get lost in the long list of emails and you might miss it. Outlook is trying to remove that issue and give you all the emails you need to look at right now and then provides a toggle for you to see the rest whenever you need.

My problem with this is I don’t know what emails Outlook thinks needs to be in Focused or Other and a lot of times I ended up forgetting switching over to other thinking that an email just hasn’t come yet. Again, this is another filter or barrier that an email client thinks is useful but for me just gets in the way. Mail just gives me my emails and I like it that way.