Week Calendar

Week Calendar for iPhone is in my honest opinion, the best iPhone calendar app. So there ya go, I said it right at the start of the review to get that out there. I'm not saying it’s 100% spot on perfect but it's as close as I've been able to find as an overall Calendar package.
Week Calendar allows for all the default requirements I look for. Two default alarms for event creation on timed events, separate default alarm options for all day events, specify default event duration, specify which calendar to use by default, select any day of the week as your start day and then it goes on to do so much more.

Week View

I love how Week Calendar allows you to set custom colours per event and auto colours for events containing a certain word or words on the title. It has a great graphical week (as shown on the right) and month views (shown below) with the generic day view that pretty much all calendar apps including the stock iPhone app offers.
Coming back to the month view subject, Week Calendar actually offers two month views. Mini Month and Month View. Month view is very similar to the stock iPhone calendar but designed how Apple should have done theirs in the first place. It has a smaller month grid and more info at the bottom relating to the selected days events and each day in the grid gets a coloured dot per event. The colour is coded to which ever calendar the event is in. For example, my work calendar is green so I get green dots for each normal lesson booking I make. The Mini Month view in Week Calendar is one of my personal favs, it not only looks graphically great as far as a calendar can but is also very clear to read and easy to use. Double tapping a day takes you to the day view with a further double tap returning you to the previous view. This double tap action actually works in all views to get to day view where event creation is easiest.


Mini Month View

I feel I have to talk more about the week view, I mean it wouldn't be right not to considering its called Week Calendar after all. The week view was often my primary view when I first started out with the app but as my driving instruction business got busier, I found myself needing a good month view to use. The week view is also great looking and has often been compared to that of the Mac Calendar in appearance (can't pass comment as I'm not a Mac user myself) and is not only great to see at a glance what you have booked and when you're free for the week but also very useable to create events directly by touch, hold and drag to a time slot. This last point may be less valid if you have big hands though but easily solved by a double tap to day view.
The event creation screen in Week Calendar isn't to dissimilar to the standard iPhone calendar event creation screen, the day and time picker is the same in function with the added warning at the top for overlapping events when selecting time. It does have more options than found in the iPhone calendar though but non the less, very easy to change over to if you've only been using the inbuilt app before trying this. The main differences are the addition of templates, which can be created from existing events or via the inbuilt settings menu, custom colour and contacts. Custom colour, as previously mentioned can be set per event as well as setting per calendar. Contacts can be linked to the events and templates too and by tapping a linked contact, you get the iPhone Contacts detail’s screen with all of it's functionality (try saying that last big three times fast!).
For me, the weakest point in Week Calendar is the event creation screen. The templates are great for time saving but you have to manually alphabetise them which is a pain if you have lots of them (like I do for all my Driving Instruction pupils) but great if you only have a few that you use regularly and want those first. So it's really only a bit weaker if you an make effective use of templates compared to say Calengoo or Calvetica Calendars. Calengoo is the best for event creation in my opinion as it searches your address book as you start typing the event name. Calvetica has the best time picker for your events which is actually very intuitive to use. But using wheels to adjust the date and timing of an event isn't that bad, just a little slower. And week calendar does support drag and drop of events to reschedule them.
So overall, I think Week Calendar is a great app. As far as iPhone calendar app go, it's the closest to perfect that I've found as an overall package. It's makes great use of the iPhone’s screen space and has all the general configuration options you need for quick event creation and management. There are a couple of minor improvements that could be made like with event creation but overall it's definitely my current iPhone calendar app of choice.
Week Calendar review score - 4.8/5.
- Veiledbunneh

Tempus Event Calendar

Tempus is not a personal favourite for me as a calendar app. Initially I thought it would offer that perfect balance between Calvetica Classic and Calvetica Calendars (as its now called in the app store instead of Calvetica 4). Unfortunately it's not.
Tempus has a nice month view that's bigger and clearer than that found in Calvetica Calendars using most of the screen space on the iPhone in a similar fashion to Calvetica Classic. This was a good point in my opinion as it makes the month view easier on the eye.
Tempus has the scrolling week view in landscape mode like in Calvetica Calendars but in a black and white colour scheme. This is good in the iPad but horrible to use in iPhone due to the screen size and amount of info being crammed in. Being able to adjust the zoom level so you have to scroll up and down and bit to see the full 24hrs would be a real bonus and would make this view much better and far more usable as I found it hard to clearly identify the start and end time of events.
If you find the detail of events in Calvetice Classic of Calvetica Calendars too much, Tempus might hit the mark for you but I find it a bit too basic for me as a business user. Upon tapping a day from the month view, it takes you to a “week list” view. It doesn't show any blank time slots, just a scrolling week view list of the current evens for the working week that the selected day resides in. This is probably fine for personal and social use if it's only a handful of events each week. This, however, also means you have to use the plus button for event creation! This was a tad horrific for me as I hate being forced to used the plus button. In fact I rarely ever use it for event creation. I like being able to tap, double tap, tap and hold or whatever other flavour of placing the event directly in a time slot to create my events. The reason I'm being so fussy about this is for efficiency (aka laziness) as this generally auto populates the event time and in most good calendar apps also the duration.
That's pretty much all that separates this from Calvetica Calendars as I believe they recently pulled the task management side of things. Well that and the colour as is mainly black and white for the look of Tempus rather than red and white. It even shares the same search bug where it returns your search results in random order rather than in a logical date order.

So in summary, Tempus isn't bad calendar overall but it's more simplistic approach to managing your appointments isn’t a hit with me and as such I’m only awarding it 2.5/5 for that, the poor search functionality and the poor iPhone week view screen usage.

Epic Win

I’ve been testing Epic Win, a simple todo
management app by Supermono, for the last couple of weeks. I've got to say its pretty damn good.
For those not familiar with todo apps, by simple todo app, I mean Epic Win allows you to create todo reminders with the options of adding alarms or repeating the todo with all the repeat options you’d expect from a decent todo app. It doesn't allow for project and/or checklist creation. As a point though, it doesn't aim to do these either.
So why do I think Epic Win is good and what makes it different and stand out from the plethora of other todo apps out there? Quite simply, it adds an element of fun to todo management in the form of simple RPG elements and loot. Probably the best part of this is it doesn't take itself seriously from an RPG point of view and the loot you get is done in an almost mockingly comical RPG style. In addition to loot you also have an avatar that levels up as you defeat the items on your list. XP (experience points) as assigned to the task when creating it. You assign the xp in 50 point increments ranging from 50-300 points. Supermono recommend assigning do values based on task difficulty to make things more fun and to help rank tasks in your todo list. Tasks also have a choice of 5 skill areas to be picked on creation which the xp also feeds as well as your progress to next level. These skill areas are Strength, Stamina, Intellect, Social and Spirit. So if, for example, you have to load up the car with heavy suit cases before going on holiday you might want to assign this to strength. Maybe you have to call the mother-in-law, this could be assigned to Social or maybe Stamina if it's a bit of an arduous chore to do.
Now you may be thinking this sounds like a lot of effort when all you want to do is create a reminder on your list of jobs to do. In reality it only takes a couple of seconds to set the xp and tap on of the 5 categories. If however that couple of extra seconds to make a todo list more interesting sounds like too much, Epic Win isn't for you. If having a little fun on the side at the same time as getting things done sounds appealing, it almost certainly is the right app for you.
Epic Win has generally been made with a good amount of polish too. The look of the app is clean, the sound effects are great and they way you have to hold down the little xp star on each today to make your avatar beat up the job is great. It even takes him or her longer to defeat the bigger point scoring jobs before the explode not bits and suck into your loot tab.
On the subject of tabs, there are five of them at the bottom of the screen. Quests, Beaten, Profile, Loot and Options. Quests is your todo list. Beaten are the completed todo’s which you can go into and redo them to re add to your quest list and save time by not having to recreate the job from scratch. Profile shows your avatar’s progress across the 5 stats and towards the next level up. As your level up the character description changes and so does the appearance. The Loot tab has two options, a map view which has a tiny avatar on a wavey path which list how far you've travelled and graphically shows how far you've got to go to the next loot item. The other screen in the loot tab shows crap load of empty boxes and as you scroll down the loot you have randomly unlocked populated in its corresponding box.
There are a couple of minor bugs that I've reported to the developers and they are very responsive at replying on email too. The two bugs are on setting the alarm time, sometimes it doesn't update properly and I've had to redo it and the app icon badge counter doesn't update until you open the app that day. Fortunately I've found myself opening the app and trying to think of some quick 50xp point worthy jobs to do so I can get some more xp for my character. Sad I know but it did make me actually want to get more done which is a very positive thing for your todo list.
Over all for me, I’d give Epic Win 4/5 due to the couple of bugs and it could do with an auto snooze function like Due has, otherwise, it's a great little productivity app.
- Veiledbunneh
Images borrowed from official epic win developers website