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