Another year has flown by, and we all know what that means: another set of major updates to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are upon us!

It’s always exciting to discover the new features Apple packs into their latest updates, and we love nothing more than trying to figure out how to best take advantage of these new features in both Fantastical and Cardhop. What’s more, we know many of our fans spend time thinking about this, too — after all, we read all your feature requests, messages and tweets!

So let’s take a look at how Fantastical and Cardhop integrate with Apple’s new updates, and how you can look forward to using our apps as soon as you update your devices.

Time-Sensitive Notifications

Sometimes important notifications can be missed. This is still true if you’re using Apple’s new Focus mode to shut out distractions when you’re trying to concentrate on an important project, or to wind down before bed. Or perhaps you’re using Apple’s new Scheduled Summary feature so you don’t have to scroll through a long list of notifications each time you pick up your device?

However, sometimes specific notifications are important to receive at the time they’re sent: perhaps you have a project-related task due soon and you need to be reminded of it? Maybe you need to make sure you don’t forget a relative’s birthday tomorrow? Or perhaps you don’t want an important event alert to be buried amongst your social media updates?

In situations like these, Apple’s new Time-Sensitive Notifications feature is helpful. We made sure that Fantastical and Cardhop fully support this, so that even if you’re trying to shut out the world and escape from notifications for whatever reason, you’ll not have to worry about missing the notifications from Fantastical and Cardhop that you actually want to be alerted to.

Privacy-Sensitive Widgets

We all love the new style of widgets that Apple introduced in iOS 14, and we know some people even found themselves using them more than the main apps! Widgets are so convenient that it’s natural to place as many as possible in your device’s Today view, so you can access it from the lock screen with a simple swipe from the left.

One downside to this was that anyone else who happened to pick up your device could also do this. For people who enter personal and private information into their calendars and contacts (that’s everyone, right?) this presented a privacy compromise. Thankfully, Apple has resolved this compromise, and now allows developers to hide the data on their widgets until the device is unlocked.

Both Fantastical and Cardhop take advantage of this new feature, and so if anyone picks up your device and tries to access the Today view from the lock screen, they won’t be able to glean any information from Fantastical and Cardhop.

So please go ahead and add as many widgets to your Today view! Your private data will be accessible to you alone.

Extra Large Widgets for iPad

Continuing our discussion on widgets, iPad enthusiasts will be pleased to know that they can now take advantage of extra large widgets on their devices.

Use Fantastical’s larger calendar widget to clearly see where you are in the current month, and see even more events than usual in the item list to the right.

With Cardhop, you can fit even more contact birthdays into a single widget, and choose to display them with the date, or with a countdown to the birthday. With all this additional space, there really is no excuse for forgetting anyone’s birthday now!

Quick Notes

Finally, iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey introduced a helpful new way to take notes while using other apps. After invoking Quick Notes while using Fantastical or Cardhop, you’ll be able to add a link to the note that takes you right back to the app you were using when you made it.

The next time you’re browsing your notes and see a reminder to review one of your events, open the note and tap the link to be taken back to Fantastical right away!

Quick Notes can also identify when you’re using an app that contains a previously-linked note, and then show a prompt to let you open the note. This could be useful if you’re about to email a client from Cardhop, and then the outline you drafted in Notes pops up automatically for you to review.

How will you fit Quick Notes into your workflows with Fantastical and Cardhop? Be sure to let us know!

More to Come…

We hope you enjoy taking advantage of these new system features in Fantastical and Cardhop, and make the most of Apple’s new OS updates when using our apps. Everyone at Flexibits really appreciates your ongoing support of our products. Please stay tuned for more exciting updates in the near future!