Calvetica 4 - Fast Calendar and Tasks

The Default Calendar View

Calvetica 4 or Calvetica Fast Calendar and Tasks is actually a really good calendar app. It doesn't have the best reviews on the app store like its predecessor (Calvetica Classic) but in my honest opinion is a far better app overall. Also just to mention, the iPad version, which comes with the iPhone version (or the other way depending on which you purchase it on) is still currently my calendar of choice and has been for a while despite trying to find a better one. However it's not my iPhone calendar app of choice.
The iPhone version is a good calendar app and I have on several occasions set it as my main calendar on the bottom of my phone screen but I always end up going back to Week Calendar as my main iPhone calendar app.
Now at first look, Calvetica 4 is very slick in appearance with clean lines, the whole month of events show on an approx half screen size month calendar with little coloured dots in each day box to represent events on each if your calendars. Below the month calendar view is a detail view that you can pinch/pull to switch between three view modes. These are a week list, listing the days of the current week and the appointments in each day, then pulling to drill down a level to the current day agenda view (the one I have it set to most of the time) and again pulling to drill down to the full day view that shows the full 24hrs of the day and where your appointments fit in. This last view is great for creating events as you just tap on the hour gap you it to start which opens the event creation screen. In Landscape mode, the iPhone switches to a free scrolling week view which I'm not a fan but I'll come back to this later.
The iPad screen layout is far better than the iPhone. On the iPad you have the full month in a free scrolling view shown taking most of the screen up with you above mentioned pinch/pull-able detail view down the right side. The landscape view here allows even more detail t be shown in the month calendar list the colours dots with event name next to them. On iPad I always have the detail view set to full day as I only need that to see what time the events in a day are at and where the gaps are for bookings. The iPad, as you've probably gathered, doesn't switch to the week view in landscape, instead you have to perform a 3 finger swipe or hit the ”(7)” button to switch to and from it. This is also better than the iPhone version again just due to screen size although for reasons I will later mention something I still don't like using.

The Landscape Week View

Event creation is my favourite part if Calvetica 4 for both iPhone and iPad. And it's what keeps me coming back to it on the iPhone too. It's just the best thought out event creation in all of the Calendar apps I've tried and tested. So to start event creation you can use the above mentioned method of tapping on a time slot or you can just hit the ”+” icon and creat an event from scratch. The creation screen presented has the event title text box at the top, a large number pad for setting the time, you can select start and end times to enter then you can either hit done and the event is created or you can hit more to pull up the full event creation detail options like, location, notes, alarms, etc etc. You can also swipe the start end selector to change it to an all day event.
Something that I also love around event creation are the preset options Calvetica 4 offers which is again another area it excels in. You can set default event duration, default alarms (and you can have more than 2 if you like, some apps restrict you to one), default calendar or prompt for calendar choice each time you create an event, default all day event alarms should you want one, icon badge, day start and end hours, week start day (you can pick any day of the week), 24hr format and several more options on top of that. This combined with the event creation screen(s) allows for the fastest and easiest to use event creation I've seen in any calendar app so far.
Calvetica 4 also come with a task management section however it's not something I personally use. I have taken a quick look at it but it seemed to be quite a basic level of task management. I'm a user of Things and Due which I have reviewed separately and find they strike the perfect balance of task management for me.
One of the more recent features added to Calvetica 4 which is also another reason it is my preferred iPad calendar is the ability to force iOS to refresh my iCloud calendars. iCloud is a great service but for some reason Apple can't seem to get the push working in a consistent manner, it drops out after a day or too and requires iPhone and iPad resets, and sometimes even going as far as removing and resetting my iCloud account. Calvetica circumnavigated this problem for me. It's as if you opened the default iOS calendar and hit the refresh button to pull in new events. Calvetica and Week Calendar are the only two calendar apps I've found that currently utilise this feature so it's a big selling point for me as someone that has calendars synced between, my iPhone and iPad, and my other half’s iPhone as well.
So after all this good praise you may be wondering why I don't have Calvetica 4 as my default iPhone app. It's for 2 reasons. 1) The landscape week view on the iPhone is almost a great idea. If they allows you to zoom it in to your working hours only like Calvetica Classic does then it would be my app of choice and the second point I'm about to mention would be less of an issue. In its current state, the week view is fiddley at best as there is too much being squeezed in so it becomes hard to read and judge the event times. If maybe you have the same view in portrait that may also work better.
2) the search function is broken and has been for months. I have reported and chased this with the developers who are always very polite and responsive but thus far haven't actually fixed it. By broken I mean when you search it returns the results in a rather bizzar order rather than sorting them in date order. As a driving instructor (or anyone that may have multiple booking with a client) being able to search for them and confirm appointments makes life very easy and save time and possible errors.
So if these 2 niggles for me were fixed it would be hands down my favourite and recommended calendar for iPhone and iPad. As it is, I recommend it for iPad as the ui is far better with the extra screen real estate but the iPhone version is pipped at the post by Week Calendar with its better week view and search functionality. If these last points are not something you're fussed about though, then it's possibly the calendar you've been looking for.

**UPDATE**
Got to say I'm now really disappointed. There have been several updates during the time I've been using this app and despite reporting the search bug multiple times and getting polite replies from the devs it appears they are just paying me lip service and not actually bothering to try and fix something that is quite a serious fault for me. It's a shame too as I like many of the other features but the search problem returning search results in a random order is not acceptable. I am therefore retracting my recommendation for this calendar and reducing the score to 3/5.
Over all score from me, 3/5.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad