As we all know, a lot of change has happened in the past few months. For example, your normal morning work commute might have been a 30-minute ride down the highway, but it now probably resembles a 30-second trip down the hallway. 😀

Since we launched the new Fantastical in January (can you believe it’s been 5 months?), we wanted to recap some of the changes that we’ve shipped since then, as well as some that we’re releasing today, which will help you get your work done from home, or wherever you may do work these days.

The past few months

On January 29th we launched the all-new version of Fantastical. Many of you have written to us on Twitter or contacted us from our support area to let us know what you think about your favorite time-management app, Fantastical.

We’ve had an amazing amount of feedback, as well as suggestions (lots of them!) from you — and we listened. In just a few months since we launched the new Fantastical, we have shipped over a dozen updates, some of which have included your most-requested features.

Some of the highlights of those updates are as follows:

iPad Keyboard Shortcuts

With iPadOS becoming a true powerhouse platform of productivity, we wanted Fantastical to help you manage your day even more efficiently. In version 3.0.9, we considered two very important words that save so much time: keyboard shortcuts.

Creating parity with the Mac was paramount for Fantastical’s latest iteration, and keyboard shortcuts are essential in enabling you to do your work faster.

This quick reference table shows that, like the Mac, the iPad is now able to quickly present a view of your Day, Week, Month and Year with simple key commands:

Command-1Command-2Command-3Command-4
DayWeekMonthYear

Additionally, you can conveniently switch between your Calendar Sets using the Control key, along with 1, 2, 3, etc. There are lots more keyboard shortcuts on the iPad, so be sure to press and hold your command key and poke around a bit!

iPad Cursor Support

When Apple announced trackpad support for iPadOS, we immediately saw the potential for this to be supported in Fantastical. In version 3.0.9 we added cursor support so that you could use that shiny new Magic Keyboard (or any supported trackpad or mouse) to move quickly around your slab of glass and get things done with Fantastical.

iPad cursor support

New Apple Watch Complication Style

The new Fantastical for Apple Watch has come a long way from its predecessor — so much so that Fantastical can display everything from a 10-day weather report to the next 3 months of your events and tasks right from within a (maximally-sized) 44 millimeter face. We wanted to push that functionality even more, so we’ve added a complication that gives you a bit more detail about your upcoming meeting. The “Timed Events & Tasks (Details)” complication was added in version 3.0.11 as an alternative to “Timed Events & Tasks”, and can be viewed on the Infograph Modular, as well as Modular Compact faces.

Apple Watch showing Fantastical's new Details complication.

Today’s version 3.1 update

Everyone is finding new ways to stay productive while working from home. With that in mind, we changed course on our roadmap to bring you some additions (that we think you’ll find very convenient and time-saving) to help you make work done from home easy to do.

We’ll Join You: Automatic Conference Call Link Detection

Fantastical now supports Automatic Conference Call Link Detection for Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, RingCentral Meetings, Skype for Business, BlueJeans, and Lync. This means Fantastical will automatically show a “Join Meeting” button at the top of your event details when you have a meeting with one of these conference call providers.

We also added a convenient button that you can tap or click to instantly join your next conference call or video chat. The Join button will show up with your next event when it contains a conference link, making it a one-tap (or one-click) way to join your meetings!

Join button displayed on an event.

Gone are the days of hunting for that meeting link. It’s Fantastical!

Timed Calendar Sets

Calendar sets have been a very cool way to automatically toggle multiple calendars on and off based on your device’s location. When you left the house for work, maybe you had set up your “Work” or “Daytime” calendar set to activate, so that you could focus on those things that mattered to you when you were going to work. When you arrived left work, your calendar set may have been switched to “Home” automatically.

Well, with most of us working from home these days, we wanted to allow that same type of calendar set transition — but for this update, we based it on time.

You can now select the calendar set that you want to have activated at a certain time, so that you see the right set of calendars in the right context. The time selection is right next to location in your settings from within the calendar set.

Time based activation for your calendar set.

Fantastical Proposal Email Changes

Many of you have written to us that you love Fantastical’s proposal feature when inviting others to meetings, but want to be more selective about the email address that shows up for your invitees. If your Flexibits account was set up with your personal email (such as [email protected]), you may feel unprofessional since the proposal will have that address in the email that gets sent to your invitees. Well, the good news is that we’ve changed all of that, and now you can add a separate email address that will be displayed when your proposal emails are sent. You can do this now by signing into your Flexibits account at hub.flexibits.com from within the Account section.

Choose which email meeting proposals will use.

Our spiffy new video

We wanted to give you a glimpse of all of the new features before you go and check them out for yourself, so here’s a video that we made…

If you are already using Fantastical Premium, this update is included in your subscription, of course. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial or check out all of the Premium features first.

And that’s all for now! We hope you’re enjoying Fantastical as much as we enjoy helping you reduce friction and make the most from your time working from home. We have lots coming in the future, and we’ll be back before you know it for another check in.

Stay productive!