Fantastical 1.2 is now available, providing complete localizations for French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Not only is the UI localized, Fantastical understands these languages, automatically detecting the language you’re using regardless of your Mac’s language setting!

Since the parsing engine needed to be translated for each language, localizing Fantastical was a great deal of work. However, we’re still considering other languages in the future depending on demand. If you’d like your language supported, please contact us and let us know.

Version 1.2 also includes better repeating event recognition, so you can now enter events such as “Soccer practice every Tuesday and Thursday at 5pm” or “Lunch every Tuesday until 2/5.” There are also UI improvements, including showing event end times and dimming out today’s past events.

With 1.2 out the door, we’re shifting our focus to making some internal improvements to Fantastical. Part of these improvements will go towards supporting for reminders, along with a number of other features. We’ll be sharing development progress and sneak peeks here when the time comes.

Don’t forget: we’ll be at Macworld/iWorld 2012 this week. Come say hello to us at booth #228 in the OS X Zone!

If you’re going to be in San Francisco between January 26 and 28, come to Macworld/iWorld 2012 and visit us in the OS X Zone (booth #228). We’ll be handing out super spiffy Flexibits stickers and demoing the latest release of Fantastical.

Best of all, we have 100 free passes to give away! To get your free Exhibits Pass (a $25 value) just click here and register. Your $25 Exhibits Pass discount will be applied automatically.

UPDATE: Sorry, all of our free passes have been claimed. Hopefully you’ll still come and visit us. We have free stickers to give away.

UPDATE 2: Great news! We have an additional 250 free passes to give away! Click this link to register and your $25 Exhibits Pass will be free. If your Exhibits Pass doesn’t appear as free, it means we’ve reached our limit.

UPDATE 3: All of our additional free Macworld/iWorld passes are now gone. Thanks to all who signed up… see you in the OS X Zone!

Macworld/iWorld 2012 Exhibit Hall hours are 10:00 AM-5:00 PM on Thursday and Friday and 10:00 AM-4:00 PM on Saturday. Hope to see you there!

Fantastical was selected for inclusion in Best of Mac App Store 2011. This feature collects the year’s best apps, chosen by the Mac App Store editorial team, for users to explore and download.

Wow! We’re honored to be selected for this incredible recognition. We thank the Mac App Store editorial team at Apple for selecting Fantastical for this feature and of course you, our users, for your incredible reviews on the Mac App Store.

We’re proud to announce that Fantastical has won a 2011 Macworld Editors’ Choice Award (aka the Eddy)! The Eddys recognize Macworld’s favorite products released in the past 12 months and being on this list is a great honor.

We are very grateful to the editors at Macworld and of course, all of our users for all the incredible reviews, feedback, and praise. We’re hard at work on the next version of Fantastical and committed to delivering the quality and functionality you’ve come to expect.

We asked our friend and screencast maestro Don McAllister to create a very nice Fantastical video tutorial screencast for ScreenCastsOnline. Not only did he oblige, he did a fantastic job, and we’re pleased to share it with you.

In the screencast, Don covers the basics and the finer details of Fantastical, including Address Book integration, event locations, keyboard shortcuts, and preferences. If you’ve ever wanted to become a Fantastical expert, this screencast is for you.

Watch the Fantastical video tutorial screencast at ScreenCastsOnline

We’re pleased to announced that Fantastical 1.1 is now available. Fantastical 1.1 includes your most requested features: editing and deleting events, along with event notes. There’s also a bunch of other enhancements and improvements including support for iCloud calendars. You can read about all the changes in Fantastical 1.1 from the Fantastical release notes. Fantastical 1.1 is a free(!) update for all existing customers:

• If you purchased directly from the Flexibits Store, you should automatically get an update notification sometime today. You can also check immediately by opening Fantastical’s preferences and clicking the Update tab.
• If you purchased from the Mac App Store, launch the Mac App Store app and click the Updates tab. By the way, Mac App Store reviews are very helpful to us. If you love Fantastical, please help us by posting a review. Thanks in advance!

As mentioned in our prior blog post, we’re already hard at work on the next major update of Fantastical, which will include reminders and localization for French, German, Italian, and Spanish. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy Fantastical 1.1.

We’re really happy to say that, barring any unforeseen problems, we’ll submit Fantastical 1.1 to the App Store sometime in the next two weeks.

The 1.1 update will include two — or three, depending on how you look at it — of your most requested feature requests: editing and deleting events and notes. Of course, there’s also a few other feature improvements, obligatory bug fixes, and enhancements. After we release 1.1, we’ll jump right to working on some of our other most requested features.

One of the those features will be reminders. That’s right: you’ll be able to add, view, and edit your reminders right from Fantastical! These are the same reminders you can add and view in iCal and iOS 5′s Reminders app. We’ve already started the interface design for this and we can’t wait to show it to you.

We’ll also be working on localization support for French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The reason we haven’t done this already is because this isn’t a standard localization where just the text is translated. Fantastical’s advanced natural language parsing engine has to be adapted which, as you can imagine, is not a trivial task.

Since Fantastical came out in May, the response from our users and reviewers has been, well, fantastic. We’re really grateful to everyone for their kind words and also for supporting us by purchasing a copy. We promise to continue the support we hope you’ve come to love.

Until next time, which we’ll try to make a lot less than four months, see ya!

A year in the making, we are proud to announce Fantastical. What started out as a university project turned into an app far surpassing our original concept and vision. In a future blog post, we’ll discuss the finer details of Fantastical — the concept, our process, and lots of inside info we think you’ll enjoy — but for now, here’s an outline of some of the details about Fantastical.

Fantastical is a calendar application for your Mac that leverages iCal, Entourage, and Outlook, letting you interact with your calendar in a whole new way. The event list and calendar are simple to use and more importantly, beautifully designed, which comes in handy when you’re looking at something boring like an event.

To us, the feature of Fantastical that makes it a killer app is the natural language parsing engine. We’ve built an incredibly expressive and intelligent engine that lets you type the way you want without learning special syntax. Not only does Fantastical recognize a wide variety of dates and times, it handles locations and people in your Address Book!

The second big feature of Fantastical is its native CalDAV implementation. It was not trivial to implement, but we had to do it to ensure a flawless experience. With native CalDAV support, your events will be synced with your favorite CalDAV calendars (like MobileMe, Google Calendar, and Yahoo! Calendar) as long as they’re set up in iCal. With native CalDAV support, Fantastical will keep your events up to date even when iCal isn’t running.

We’re launching Fantastical with a special introductory price of $14.99 (US) which will end on June 1, 2011. We hope you enjoy Fantastical as much as we enjoyed making it. Grab your free trial now and give it a whirl!

Before we go, we want to extend our thanks to Israel Alonso (who did the wonderful website design you’re currently looking at), Rogie King (who did the beautiful artwork for Fantastical), and David Lanham of The Iconfactory (who did the fantastically fantastic icon for Fantastical).

One of the nice things about being an indie developer is getting to pick who we work with and we’re very glad to have been able to collaborate with Israel, Rogie, and David.

Until next time…