Calengoo

Calengoo is now my preferred choice of iPad Calendar replacing Calvetica 4 (or Calvetica Calendar as its now called in the app store). I recently updated the Calvetica review saying why it is no longer my preferred choice.
So moving swiftly on to my Calengoo review. Calengoo is not the best looking calendar out there. When you first open the app you may almost be a little disappointed with the appearance of the month view. Its quite bland and basic but it is clear to see your events/appointments and clarity is more important than looking pretty when it comes to the crunch. Also you may have to play Witt the font setting a little in the iPhone version to make it readable without zooming if you want to use it that way. For me, the best looking views are the portrait and landscape day views. Landscape being my personal fav for looks but portrait being my main view for functionality. I have actually asked the developer if its possible to have the all day bars from the landscape view in the portrait view as they look awesome. It's a partly opaque bar the runs vertically from top to bottom of the day rather then grouping the all day events at the top of the day. I like this bar as it really draws your attention to the fact there is an all day event on which ever day you are looking at.
While we are on the subject of graphics, it is one of the weaker points with the iPhone version of the app. There just isn't enough screen space for the month and landscape day views with the current design. The month view for iPhone needs to be reworked to maybe look more like Week Calendar or Tapcal or even Pocket Informant (Tapcal would, for me, be the preferred look for a month view as I feel it has the best month view of all calendars I've tried but cant get close to the functionality of the best ones) as I'm less keen on having to pinch to zoom or scroll the month view in landscape to make it readable. The landscape week view needs to either move or lose the top and bottom bars when the device is rotated. Here a lesson from Pocket Informat would be well applied moving the bars to the sides of the screen when rotated and rotating the buttons so they are the right way up.
These comments may sound really negative but that's not a case it's really bad to the point of rendering the app unusable, it would just improve the app making it even better than it already is.

So now to talk about where Calengoo excells and why its my iPad Calendar app of choice. It's the functionality. Quite simply, I haven't found a more functional and configurable calendar app out there. So if you want a calendar app thats for power/business use for your iPad then look no further. All the usual essential options like default event duration, default reminder(s), default calendar to assign new events too are covered and then there are literally more additional options to setup the app than you could shake a stick at. Fortunately the developer had the foresight to stick 4 buttons at the top of the Display and Use section of the app setting ranging from basic to all so it makes it more friendly for those that dont want to play about too much.
To give an example of how configurable the app is, not only can you change nearly every font, cell type colour to modify the look a bit, you can even tell it to open straight in the event title entry rather than the usual event details "list" screen. It also has the option to search you contacts as you type in the event name/title then if it is one of your contacts you are creating the event for you just tap that contact and hey presto, the details, contact number, address etc are all filled in for you. You can change how many characters need to be entered before it will search contacts in the settings but I like the default of 3 characters. If you are creating an event like, "Gym Work Out" that you put in around your work at varying days and times every week, you can add it to a template to make the creation of this event type quicker. The templates are fantastic on this too. I previously thought Week Calendar had the best templates until I discovered Calengoo templates. If you edit the template you can check or uncheck exactly which details you want to use from the event for your template making them very flexible and functional. Pocket Informat could learn a lesson here along with anyone else who wants to have template functionality in their calendar app.
Calengoo allows you to set you working hours and show this in several different ways, you can display the sunrise and sunset times too if you so wish (I like this last option as its useful for me as a driving instructor), you can set which days are your weekend, which day your working week starts on, the options really do go on and on and many of the options are set individually for the different views so if you want your weekends darker in the month view than they are in the day view you can. If you want a different font for week view to month view you can.

Calengoo as the name suggest syncs with Google Calendars and it does a great job of that. But if you dont want to use or even don't have a google account thats no problem. I moved away from Google Calendars to iCloud when it became available and Calengoo works just fine with that too. In fact, it's with iCloud that Calengoo incorporates one of my favourite and now must have options. When you open Calengoo, it prompts your iOS calendar to refresh and pull in any new appointments. The only other Calendar apps that I've tested so far that offer this feature are Week Calendar (iPhone only), Pocket Informat and Calvetica Calendars. My iPad is WiFi only and I dont like having to open the iOS calendar app to refresh and see if I have any events created on my iPhone or any events my other half has put in that I need to be aware of. iCloud push is some what unreliable I've found as sometimes it does work and other times it doesn't. So another big tick in the box for Calengoo. Another thing I like to see and feel have been let down with Calvetica is the customer support. The peeps at Calvetica are very polite but don't seem to deliver. Calengoo's developer(s) however give first class customer service normally getting back to me within 1 working day for any questions, suggestions or problems I've had in the past and actually implementing fixes and changes too.

Over all for me Calengoo is now on the bottom bar of my iPad as my main iPad Calendar and has been on and off as my main iPhone calendar app recently. Week Calendar being my other iPhone choice. With some changes to the iPhone ui it would be hands down my iPhone app of choice too but either way it's still my most recommend calendar app currently available on the app store. So if you are serious about a calendar app thats going to give you a good functional service and is a single purchase for both iPhone and iPad versions then look no further.
4.5/5 from me and would give it full marks with the iPhone appearance being improved.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad


Images as shown on the Calengoo website

SaiSuke iPhone Calendar App



Month View as shown in the app store listing

I recently downloaded Saisuke’s free version of their calendar app to test and review as it’a always generally had ok to good reviews. They have finally changed the free version to work like the full app (which is currently £6.99 on the app store) but will only sync one month of google appointments at a time and becomes add supported 15 days after the install date.
I previously tried the iPad free version and was very disappointed as its stripped right back. It only has one way google sync (pulling appointments in) and they removed the option to sync with your iCloud calendars so if you don't use google calendars it's not event good for testing to sell the app to you. It does make extra use of the space by giving you a notes section and event details list in each view but without being able to properly fill the calendar with my diary it's hard to say how it would function when loaded up with appointments.
So back to the iPhone version. This looks better and as previously mentioned, has almost all of the full app functionality. The month view is clear, and when you move the button bar to the expandable version on the date bar and remove the detail view it becomes very useful giving over 3/4 of the iPhone screen to calendar display space. The colours of the days and fonts are customisable like in Tapcal but with a few more individual day colour options and so is the way events are displayed. They can be just text, backgrounder in a rectangular box, a rounded corners box or underlined and this can be set separately for timed events, all day events and multi day events.
With the bottom detail view hidden, tapping a day in the month view opens a small window in one of the bottom screen corners giving the event details for that day. I really liked this feature, it's like what miCal does but in my opinion, better.
Double tapping a day in month view takes you to the day view. Double tapping again takes you back to month view.
The day view is quite a standard affair as you would expect from any good calendar app. To add events you can either use the add event button (which is available in all views) or tap and hold. The day view is very clear and the choice of fonts are pleasing on the eye too. The tap and hold is done really nicely and it's surprisingly easy to drag it down your calendar in 5 min intervals.
The week view is text based in portrait breaking the screen into 7 days and listing each event in the day boxes and compressing the the last two days of the week. Quite standard stuff again. You can set the start day of the week to any day of your choosing in both week and month view too.

Landscape week view as show in the app store

If you rotate the week view to landscape, you get a graphical display of your events. I found I needed to zoom out to 60% in the settings to make it useable for me. It would be nice if there was an option to have the graphical week view in portrait like Week Calendar but at least the landscape view is zoom able making it functional. Event creation in week view is either via the add button or touch and hold again which works surprisingly well with my level of zoom in the landscape mode even with the settings at 5 min intervals when position the new to be event box.
SaiSuke also has a year calendar view but as with most iPhone year calendars, it's not useful for event creation but fine for a glance at what day a future date falls on.
I found myself using just the month and day views like I did in Tapcal as these views are perfectly functional on their own and especially so with Saisuke and it's miCal type popup month view window.
So lots of good stuff mentioned so far. Onto some of the not so good points.
The month view doesn't have any way to tell you when there are more events than shown in one of the day boxes. The other apps it's similar too which are Tapcal and miCal both add an icon to the box on month view to notify you of this which is very useful. This isn't the end of the world as you have the quick pop up menu but it is really helpful to know this at a glance without having to tap the day.
SaiSuke also lacks in my needs for the default event creation. It only allows you to add one standard reminder to events by default and I like to have two. Small detail but for me it's most useful. It's has the other options like default calendar, default duration but only one default alarm.
It has a nice option to have a quick event creation screen but for me it was a bit too lacking and not configurable. I ended up needing the full creation screen which isn't really any more intuitive then the stock iOS calendar app.
I've not been able to test it for manual iOS event syncing as my iCloud push is actually working at the mo but I'll test further for this when iCloud push decides to go to sleep again.

So over all for me, SaiSuke has some really nice features and looks for pretty on screen, with an almost perfect month view. I love the month view pop up box option which partly makes up for the lack of events off screen notifier in the month view. The fact it limits default alarms to one isn't so good for me but this isn't a bad app at all. Definately try the free version before you part with your cash.

4/5 from me.


- Veiledbunneh