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