iPhone and iPad Calendar Apps, which "is the best"

I've been a long term user of Week Calender and think it is a great app offering a vast array of features to suit lite and power users however, my business as a driving instructor has really started to take off in the last month and I've had the need to book up to and over a month in advance for pupils. Week Calendar has by far the best week view of any calendar app I've tried but its month view is more of an upgrade to the standard iPhone calendar. This is what set me off on the search for a potential replacement. Now I'm also looking at getting an iPad at some point soon-ish and Week Calendar have withdrawn their iPad app so that was one point to consider when looking, the other point important to me was to graphical clarity of calendar. What I mean by that is I like my Calendar to be visual and easy to see when I have time slots available at a glance and not looking through a list trying to work out when i can fit a lesson in.

With these factors in mind I did some research reading and watching review online and reading the reviews on the app store. This helped me to narrow down my choices to Pocket Informant, MiCal, Smart Cal, Calvetica Classic, Fast Calendar & Tasks (aka Calvetica 4) and Event Calendar (Tempus).

Smart Cal for me was quickly a no no and I'm glad they offer a free trial. I found it to have am overly complicated interface that didn't work how I would expect it too and also didn't seem to consistently work the same at least for me. This could have been human error on my part but I found it hard and fiddly to use.

Event Calendar (Tempus) is essentially a lite version of Calvetica 4. I was hoping it was going to offer me a mix of Calvetica Classic and Calvetica 4 features bit disappointingly it didn't. It has the Calvetica 4 style week view which in its current state is a bit too small in landscape view and on tapping a date in the month view, opens a permanently scrolling text week view which I find to lite on info for business use. This one did cost money (£1.99) and was also a no no for me.

Pocket Informant is an app I was hoping would really hit the mark for me based on the online reviews and the price tag and it's feature list. It's the only other app I've tried that allows event template creation. Unfortunately it doesn't offer the same option control with templates and they have to have a set time unlike in Week Calendar. This is annoying as if I create an event by selecting a time slot in one of the calendar views (i.e. day view), I still have to reset the time after selecting the event template. PI does make better use of the screen space since the 2.0 update and I find it loads its various views much quicker as well whilst looking better than before. Its month view is good with several options on how to populate the view but this could be better if they took a leaf out of Calvetica 4's book. I do, however, still like the details with background colour option for the month which shows 5 events in a day before you have to tap it to see more. I also like the portrait week view with its time bar and time booked per day feature but its not quite the graphical representation I'm looking for. The landscape week view needs a zoom control as you have to scroll up and down to see events which isn't good enough for me. The day view can be zoomed out to show a week in portrait like Week Calendar but this means loosing your day view or constantly fiddling with the pinch/pull zoom.

PI does also have a task management element too but I find this very clunky to use and no where near as good as Todo. The addition of notes and contact in app is nice but linking these to events would make them far more useful than leaving them as a separate section.

PI isn't worth the rather hefty price tag of £8.99 in its current state, it's slow to update the iOS calendar, sometimes requiring an app restart to show the changes, or going into the advance options and clearing the cache which I found myself doing all too often. I want to like it, but until they iron out the rather large and annoying creases it wont take over as my main calendar app.

MiCal is a rather nice app that is almost what I wanted and at a very reasonable price of £1.49. I really liked the month view with pop up day view when a day is tapped but the lack of detail in the month view itself and the poor week view were again failing points for me. It does support multiple google calendars as it feeds off of the iOS Calendar and has a nice dashboard view but doesn't support templates. Instead they have gone for a history list and I didn't test it long enough to find out how much that list holds before things start to disappear. If does allow linking of contacts to events like Week Calendar though which is nice but doesn't allow you to custom colour events. Week Calendar is the only calendar I've used thus far that does allow this. So event though MiCal has some nice unique features, it didn't quite make the calendar experience clear and simple enough to replace Week Calendar for me.

So this leaves two final calendars, Calvetica Classic and 4. I am currently using Calvetica 4 as I like its month view. It displays events with a dot and all day events with a long dash. I love its day view with time bars down the left side that stack if you have multiple events. I also like the event creation, its simple and fast. Below the month is always a list of the day you have selected or an agenda or text based week view which you can easily move through with pinch and zoom gestures which are very logical. As mentioned earlier, (tempus) the week view in landscape isn't so nice, it shows too much info. If you could set it to zoom to your working hours for the week it could be far better and i have been in communication with the Devs about this. The Devs are on the ball and very responsive and friendly too. If you could take the functionality of Calvetica 4 but with the option to lay out the month view like Calvetica Classic but with 4's month view event population style and the suggested week view landscape change this would be so close to perfect for me. All it would need after that is template creation and per event colour options. Template are less of an issue with Calvetica though as its just so quick and easy to add an event. I have set up the defult duration to be 2 hours and setup the default alarm times so all i have to do is tap on the time slot i want and type in the pupils name and hit add. It also refreshes the data from the iOS calender faster than any other apps I've tested.

So, from a month point of view, Calvetica 4 currently is my personal favourite but from a week point of view its still Week Calendar.



So after testing all the calendar apps above I can currently say I don't feel I've found the "perfect" calendar app. If its a month view you need then Calvetica 4 is great but if you want a week view then it's got to be Week Calendar. I will be keeping all the apps on my iPhone 4 for now to see how they develope and update this blog if they change in a way that makes me feel a new best all round calendar has finally arrived or if I find a new one of course.



***Update 26/11/11***



I've been testing Tapcal (sync with google) over the last week or so. It's not perfect but if the devs implement the features promised then it will be my calendar of choice.

It has the best month view for me. Similar to that of Pocket Informant but better and more configurable. It allows you to really quickly switch between the month/day/week/list views. It has the best search function in the list view that I've used so far giving you a future and past button to switch you search between. It has a similar style of day view to Calvetica but it clearer and better always listing all day events at the top.

What it currently lacks:

Templates, it has history which I'm not a fan of and the history is only for the title or location and doesn't populate other cells in the event creation screen.

The default event duration only kicks in once you change the start time.

It doesn't have a default alarm option.

If they took the look and feel of Tapcal and merged it with the event creation default options and speed of Calvetica it would be a bloody awesome calendar. I can live without event templates if you have calvetica creation speed to be honest.

As a result of trying Tapcal I'm finding myself switching between it and Calvetica 4. So as mentioned earlier, if the devs do what they say they will I'll most likely switch to Tapcal but for now I'll have to wait and see.



***Update 8/12/11***

I decided to give Agenda calendar a try as that has some decent reviews in the app store and also allows you to send events to Due (which is an excellent simple todo app I reviewed in another blog).

On the surface it's a very clear, clean and pretty calendar app with some nice gesture controls. Great if you generally work with a short term schedule of a couple of weeks and like a continually rolling agenda list view. And actually the landscape week view is nice continuing the clean minimalistic style of the app.

That's pretty much all the good points for me though. Event creation is the same as the standard iPhone calendar and it doesn't seem to have an option to set defaults for event duration and alarms meaning it takes longer to create the event. You also have to pick the event time from the standard time and date rollers. The month view also is very disappointing. It gives you a single coloured dot per calendar that has an event in it per day. What I mean by that is if you have 3 events in calendar A and 1 in calendar B you get one dot for calendar A and one dot for calendar B. Not so good or people who have a busy schedule over a month in advance and looking to quickly identify where they can fit more in without having to go through each week.

Not a bad app for the price but it's already been removed from my phone.



***update*** 11/12/11

Today I was playing about with my old favourite Week Calendar and by chance, discovered after double tapping a month or mini month view day to get day view, if you double tap in day view it returns you to the previous month, mini month or what ever other view you were using. As a result of this week calendar has now reclaimed its spot on the bottom bar of my phone as this removes one of my previous bug bears. There are still better month views available but I think I can live with the mini month until tap cal get the overdue promised update out.

And in other news, pocket informant takes even longer to refresh updates to the iOS calendar after the recent update this week. Such a shame as I'd love it to work better for me considering the price I paid for it.

***update 3/1/2012***
I have now picked up an iPad 2 (yay!) so have started testing some iPad calendar apps. Firstly, the stock iPad calendar is a million times better than that on the iPhone. It's like they were designed and developed by completely different companies... But still lacks configurable options for week start day and event creation defaults. If it had those I'd be totally happy with it as it looks great and syncs perfectly with google calendars.
So of all the apps mentioned so far above for iPhone, only a handful included the iPad version. Those were Calvetica 4, Tempus and Agenda Calendar. Agenda calendar just looked like a bigger version of the iPhone app so was an instant no go for me. Tempus looks better and makes much more use of the screen space for iPad but still lacks features. Calvetica 4 is miles better than it was on the iPhone and I was a fan of it there too. Like Tempus it makes great use of the additional screen space but it has the options to make event creation an absolute breeze and the display detail I want too. The only downside I can see with it at the mo is when I make calendar updates direct on google, via my iPhone or if my other half books an event in. It won't pull the data in on it's own resulting in me having to open the stock iPad calendar to download the google data which then shows in Calvetica. I have reported this to the developer of course and at this stage I'm not sure if this relates to my iPad being a wifi only software bug the devs overlooked or a setting that I've not found so far. Awaiting their response to update.

Lastly before signing off I'm currently testing Calengoo for both iPhone and iPad. Only started testing this yesterday so will have more to say once I have used it for a while. The iPad version is looking really good so far though I'm less keen on the iPhone version due to the way it makes use of screen space (something the devs are looking to improve tho). That's the only negative so far. The developer is really on the ball and passionate about the app and there are more configuration options than you could shake a whole tree at let alone a stick but the devs cleverly added four buttons at the top of the display and use setting to filter what level of configuration you want to delve into from basic to all.

***update 17/1/12 ***
Firstly Calengoo. The best google sync calendar I've tired that directly syncs to your google calendars. It allows you to add events off line if you on have a wifi iPad like me or no data connection on your iPhone then update them to google later which is surprisingly not the case with all calendar apps out there. Tapcal, for example, won't allow you to create events without confirming the sync so if you have a slow or even no data connection on the iPhone it's not so good. Fine for writing to iOS calendar though.
Calengoo is also happy to work directly off of your iOS calendar so if you don't plan on using google calendars you don't have too but you can still get the great features of Calengoo. I couldn't list all the Calengoo features here, the developers website goes into detail about every feature in the help section but I will talk about a few that really stood out for me.
Calengoo pros: event creation. Hands down amazing for detail population. If you have the details in you contacts list then it's super easy to fill. By default Calengoo starts searching your contacts after you type the first three letters of the event title. The list of matches appears further down the screen on both versions of the app. Tap on the one you want and the contact info is populated into your event. I set my default event duration, default alarms (which can be set globally as well as by calendar) and default calendar so all that was left was to tweak the event start time and duration if needed. For me as a driving instructor this made for the fastest event creation.
As mentioned earlier there are sooooo many configuration options to get the calendar working how you want. I think I spent almost an hour browsing through them when I first installed the app as I hit the all option view. Ended up mailing the developer to ask if the calendar could be setup to act in a certain way and he got back with me within 24 hrs with a clear and detailed answer.
Calengoo cons: well its not very pretty, there are definitely plenty of prettier calendars out there but then this has been built for functionality and not looks.
Also there is no option to turn off all day event alarms by default. Default alarms are either on or off. You can assign a time for all day event alarms though. For example, all all day event alarms to go off a 08:00. This can be set to what ever time you like.
The other thing that bugged me a bit is the event notification, it always has its own reminder alarm as well as the iOS reminder alarm. I prefer the iOS alarm myself but you don't seem to be able to disable this from what I could see. Small thing but 2 alarms every time a reminder went off was annoying for me.
Overall, Calengoo is a very serious calendar that definitely offers the functionality for power users that other apps can only aspire to. If looks are your concern then this won't float your boat but if you want functionality first and looks that are clear and workable then go get Calengoo now.

As a side note to where I have gone with this. I've decided to move my calendars from google to iCloud due to syncing issue between devices as google exchange is crap in my opinion. It doesn't work if you don't have a data connection. Currently I am using both calendars but only creating events in iCloud so once I get passed all the existing google events I can switch that off.
Current app choice, for iPhone, it's back to Week Cal. Tapcal finally got their update out the other week and it's disappointing. They have fixed the bugs but the event creation is still a bit long winded. Also Week Cal seems to be the only calendar that prompts the iOS calendar to refresh when launched unlike most other iPhone apps. This is currently my calendar of choice to use.
For the iPad its going to be either calvetica 4 as that works fine with iCloud or Calengoo, however I've messed about so much with the Calengoo settings then changed the way I want to access my calendars, that I think I'm gonna have to reinstall it. All those options can get a little crazy and it could probably do with a further option filter to show the ones you have changed from stock settings. Once I have it sorted though it's likely to be my app of choice for the iPad as it just works so well.

-Veiledbunneh