Fantastical and Cardhop for iOS and macOS gain new productivity features

Fantastical scheduling gains Break Time, Lead Time and so on. Cardhop now allows you to keep track of birthdays, anniversaries and more.

Banner promoting the Flexibits Premium subscription which includes access to all features in the Fantastical and Cardhop apps across apple devices — One subscription, two apps | Image: Flexibits

What’s happening? Developer Flexibits has pushed feature-rich updates to its Fantastical to-do and calendar app, as well as its contact management software Cardhop. Fantastical is getting various scheduling improvements and Cardhop now lets you track birthdays, share business cards via QR codes and more.
Why care? Fantastical and Cardhop are among the best apps for Apple platforms that are updated regularly which ensures they continue receiving new features and security fixes. These are the apps you can rely on. Both Fantastical and Cardhop are also beautifully designed. Developer Flexibits implements Apple’s latest platform features in a reasonable amount of time rather than leaving you waiting years to get just the basic stuff like drag and drop.
What to do? Update your copies of Fantastical and Cardhop to their latest respective versions in the App Store to try out the new features.

Fantastical picks up scheduling improvements

Fantastical for iOS/iPadOS [App Store link] and Fantastical for macOS [App Store link] are getting a few productivity-focused improvements that the company says have been one of the top requests from users. The app’s scheduling features that we covered in detail are getting enhanced support for videoconference calls.

A Mac screenshot showcasing the Openings feature in Fantastical for macOS, with a popup displayed when someone requests a meeting — Sharing your availability with Fantastical Openings | Image: Flexibits

Now when you define your availability using the Openings feature, you can automatically add Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex to your meetings. And to make it easier to control your meetings, the team has added Break Time and Lead Time to define some personal time between meetings so you always have time to prepare and never get scheduled back to back. You can also restrict Openings appointments to specific date ranges.

For further information about Scheduling, Openings and other features available in this to-do, calendar and reminders software, read our review of Fantastical.

Cardhop makes it easier to track birthdays

As we wrote in our review, Cardhop for iOS/iPadOS [App Store link] and Cardhop for macOS [App Store link] are probably the only contacts apps you’ll actually want to use. Just like Fantastical, Cardhop too supports natural-language processing, integrates with your favorite apps easily and looks great. Cardhop 2.1, the latest update, brings a new feature called Celebrations which makes it a cinch to keep track of the birthdays and anniversaries of all the people in your contact lists.

Cardhop’s home screen widget on iOS now supports QR codes for effortless sharing of your virtual business card with others. Other tidbits include a new action for easy creation of a task or event from Cardhop into Fantastical and more.

Pricing and availability

All of the new features in Fantastical and Cardhop are available for free with your Flexibits Premium subscription. Billed monthly ($4.99) or yearly ($3.33), it includes all of the features in Fantastical and Cardhop across all devices.

Fantastical Premium is also available for families of five at $7.99/month or $5.42/month when signing up for a yearly subscription. For further information about the Flexibits Premium subscriptions, visit flexibits.com/pricing.