After shipping Fantastical 2 for Mac a year ago with tons of new features and a revamped user interface for OS X Yosemite and later, developer Flexibits today pushed version 2.2 of its calendar, reminder and to-do productivity app on the Mac App Store.
Fantastical 2.2 for Mac brings powerful new features to the experience, starting with full support for Microsoft Exchange accounts with native account syncing, invitation responses, availability lookup, categories and people lookup.
Other enhancements include availability information in calendars, support for printing with multiple layouts and a host of other under-the-hood refinements.
“We launched Fantastical 2 for Mac one year ago, and our goal was to reinvent Fantastical itself,” said Michael Simmons, co-founder of Flexibits. “Today’s update is the biggest we’ve ever shipped and we think our users are going to love it.”
Lots of useful tidbits
Among other tidbits worth mentioning: there’s now a second time zone timeline so you can quickly view other time zones in Fantastical. You can now move and delete multiple items at once, start the week or month views on the current day or week and more.
As for availability information, this feature has its dedicated user interface for checking other people’s availability information, as seen below. In combination with native Exchange support, it makes Fantastical a whole lot more useful in corporate environments.
Availability information
Availability requires a supporting calendar service, such as Exchange, Google Apps or OS X Server. Fantastical also has a native CalDAV engine which allows you to connect directly to other popular online calendar services like iCloud, Google and Yahoo.
Both Mac and iOS editions of Fantastical sport a capable natural language parsing engine, an attractive UI with day, week, month and year views, iCloud reminders support, light and dark themes, time zone support, birthday alerts and lots more.
Fantastical 2.2 changelog
Here’s what’s new in Fantastical 2.2 for Mac:
- Native Exchange support (respond to invitations, free/busy lookup, people lookup, categories, and more)
- View availability of attendees (if supported by the server)
- Printing
- iCloud shared calendar notifications
- Invitee response notifications when someone accepts or declines your invitation
- Google Hangout links are now shown with Google Apps accounts
- Push for Google accounts shows changes immediately
- Receive suggestions from Google Contacts when adding invitees
- Location suggestions now appear as you type in sentences for new events
- Multiple selection (move and delete multiple items at once)
- Drag and drop the preview to reschedule events and reminders as you’re creating them
- Second time line with custom time zone for day and week views (Preferences > Advanced)
- Added preference to start month view on the current week
- Selected date is now highlighted in week and month views
- Improved year view makes it easier to see very busy days
- Faster search when using calendars with large numbers of recurring events
- Importing events from .ics files will now add default alerts to the imported events
- Set the refresh rate of individual subscribed calendars
- Use Apple Mail or Airmail to send event invitations and responses when using a CalDAV server that doesn’t support server-side invitations
- Mail events using Airmail when it is set as your default email reader
- General performance improvements throughout the app
- Various fixes and improvements
This version of Fantastical is a free update for existing users.
Current users can get the update for free via the Mac App Store’s Updates tab or through the in-app update if they purchased the app directly from the Flexibits Store.
Fantastical 2.2 availability
The app needs an Intel-based Mac with a 64-bit processor and OS X Yosemite 10.10 or later and is localized in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.