The ULTIMATE Guide To Surviving In A Fantastical Fantasy Land. Mac OS

adminJune 02 2021

The ULTIMATE Guide To Surviving In A Fantastical Fantasy Land. Mac OS

At a Glance

Expert’s Rating

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Cons

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Our Verdict

Chances are, you use Mac OS X’s iCal calendaring program, the calendaring component of Microsoft’s Entourage or Outlook program, or an online calendar for your scheduling needs. But how often do you actually require the huge calendar view? If you’re at all like me, most of the times you open your calendar program, it’s to see what events are coming up in the next few days or to quickly create an appointment. And given the convoluted interfaces of these programs, “quickly” is often not that quick.

Over the past few years, I’ve covered a number of programs that aim to take the place of a full-blown calendar program for these types of tasks, including Today, FlexCal, MagiCal, and MenuCalendarClock. Each still works well, but the newest kid on the block, Fantastical ($15; Mac App Store link) aims to combine some of the best features of these applications, along with some impressive event-creation technology, in an attractive and easy-to-use package.

When running, Fantastical appears in your menu bar as a small calendar icon displaying, by default, the current date (providing a much-requested OS X feature on its own). Unfortunately, unlike MagiCal, you can’t force Fantastical’s icon to appear at the far-right-hand side of the menu bar. I hope the developer, Flexibits, includes this capability in a future update.

Click the Fantastical icon, and a beautiful calendar appears that shows the current month, with the current day circled. Dates with events—based on your chosen calendar program—display a small bullet, and upcoming events are listed below the calendar. Click an event to view its full details.

Kotor 2 companions dark side. Fantastical works with any calendar you’ve set up in iCal, Entourage, or Outlook, including MobileMe, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar accounts. If you’re using iCal, iCal doesn’t even need to be running—Fantastical can communicate directly with CalDAV servers, which is a feature unique among similar utilities. Fantastical can also read from and write to calendars stored on your Mac; however, when using Outlook or Entourage, you’ll need to have that calendar program open, as Fantastical communicates with Outlook and Entourage using AppleScript. (Fantastical will automatically launch Outlook or Entourage if needed.) https://free-tronic.mystrikingly.com/blog/how-to-play-sims-4-online-for-free.

Fantastical works with the excellent BusyCal, although with a couple limitations. The first is that new CalDAV events created in Fantastical won’t appear in BusyCal until BusyCal’s next scheduled sync, and vice versa—so there’s often a delay between the time you create or edit an event in one program and when that change appears in the other. Second, in order for Fantastical to “see” a new calendar, it must be added to, or created in, iCal—if you add a new calendar only to BusyCal, Fantastical won’t know it exists. The developers of Fantastical and BusyCal are working together to address these limitations.

(I tested Fantastical with MobileMe and Google calendars and with iCal and BusyCal.)

You can choose whether Fantastical’s upcoming-events list displays events for today; today and tomorrow; or the next 7, 14, or 31 days. Alternatively, you can choose to show the next five, 10, or 20 events, regardless of the time frame. If you have multiple calendars configured in your main calendar program, you can also choose which of those calendar’s events appear in Fantastical; events are color-coded to match their calendars.

You can, of course, browse to any date and click it to view that date’s events (along with however many subsequent events, or days’ worth of events, you’ve chosen). Alternatively, if you hover the cursor over a date, that day’s events are displayed in a tooltip. Fantastical’s search field lets you quickly find events that match your search string, displaying results in the events list, with the the closest upcoming event selected. I wish you could quickly jump to a specific month and year, but you’ll need to use the next- and previous-month buttons to browse instead.

Just as useful as Fantastical’s event display is that you can create new events without having to open your main calendar program. You can double-click a date to create a new event on that date, manually filling in the event’s details, but Fantastical’s standout feature is its natural-language event creation.

Click Fantastical’s icon, or press the new-event keyboard shortcut, and type (in English) a conversational description of the event; Fantastical parses your description to fill in the details accordingly. https://game-pp-soccer-scratch-tamil-bonus.peatix.com. Press Return, and the new event is created, Fantastical closes, and you can get right back to work.

For example, if I type Macworld Staff Meeting Friday 10a SF office, Fantastical creates a new event with Macworld Staff Meeting as the subject, the upcoming Friday as the date, SF office as the location, and 10am to 11am as the time. (Events without an end time are assumed to last one hour; those without a time specified are assumed to be all-day events.) Vacation July 5-12 Maui creates an all-day event called Vacation, with the location as Maui, from July 5 through July 12. Fantastical deftly parses your descriptions, getting the details right the vast majority of the time. It even knows that “lunch” means noon.

A subtle but useful touch is Fantastical’s animation: As you type your event description, your letters and numbers float smoothly from the text-entry field to the appropriate fields in the event-details form. This makes for cute visuals, but it also lets you see exactly where Fantastical is getting each bit of information which, over time, helps you tailor your descriptions to Fantastical’s text-parsing logic.

If you include in your event description the name of an Address Book contact, Fantastical will let you add that person to the event’s invite list and, when the event is created, send them an invitation. (If a contact has multiple e-mail addresses, you’ll need to choose the address to which you want the invitation sent.) If you’re using Outlook, one limitation here is that you’ll need to manually confirm, from within Outlook, the sending of the invitations.

New events are created in your default calendar, although you can choose a different calendar for any event. You can even include the calendar name in your event description, letting Fantastical set the calendar for you, by preceding the calendar name with /—for example, Vacation July 5-12 Maui /personal.

Unfortunately, you can’t edit or delete an event from within Fantastical; you’ll need to open the event in your calendar program, which you can do by double-clicking the event in Fantastical. (Flexibits says event editing is coming in a future update.)

One other feature I’d like to see is the capability to “tear off” Fantastical’s window and leave it on your screen—Second Gear’s Today can remain on the screen to display your schedule and tasks, which is a useful option. You can can lock Fantastical so it stays open in its current location, but this usually leaves Fantastical blocking other windows.

Fantastical doesn’t include every feature of every other calendaring add-on, but it’s a great package that handles—with an attractive interface and some impressive options—most of the things you use your “big” calendar program to do. And it makes it much easier and more convenient to quickly create new events. I’ve been using Fantastical for a while now (I started during the program’s beta period) and the only time I actually open iCal or BusyCal—my calendar programs of choice—is when I’m trying to find a time for an event and I need to see a detailed view of my schedule.

The ULTIMATE Guide To Surviving In A Fantastical Fantasy Land. Mac OS

Note: Fantastical’s $15 introductory price is good until June 1; the standard price has yet to be determined.

Updated 5/20/2011, 8:30am, to clarify price and BusyCal-compatibility improvements.

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iTunes is going places.

Download macOS Catalina for an all‑new entertainment experience. Your music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, and audiobooks will transfer automatically to the Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books apps where you’ll still have access to your favorite iTunes features, including purchases, rentals, and imports.

You can always download iTunes 12.8 for previous versions of macOS,
as well as the iTunes application for Windows.

Hardware:

Mac computer with an Intel processor
To play 720p HD video, an iTunes LP, or iTunes Extras, a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor is required
To play 1080p HD video, a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor and 2GB of RAM is required
Screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater; 1280x800 or greater is required to play an iTunes LP or iTunes Extras
Internet connection to use Apple Music, the iTunes Store, and iTunes Extras
Apple combo drive or SuperDrive to create audio, MP3, or backup CDs; some non-Apple CD-RW recorders may also work. Songs from the Apple Music catalog cannot be burned to a CD.

Software:

OS X version 10.10.5 or later
400MB of available disk space
Apple Music, iTunes Store, and iTunes Match availability may vary by country
Apple Music trial requires sign-up and is available for new subscribers only. Plan automatically renews after trial.

iTunes

Download the latest version for Windows.

The latest entertainment apps now come installed with macOS Catalina. Upgrade today to get your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts. You can join Apple Music and stream — or download and play offline — over 75 million songs, ad‑free.

iTunes

Download the latest version from the Microsoft Store.

Hardware:

PC with a 1GHz Intel or AMD processor with support for SSE2 and 512MB of RAM
To play standard-definition video from the iTunes Store, an Intel Pentium D or faster processor, 512MB of RAM, and a DirectX 9.0–compatible video card is required
To play 720p HD video, an iTunes LP, or iTunes Extras, a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor, 1GB of RAM, and an Intel GMA X3000, ATI Radeon X1300, or NVIDIA GeForce 6150 or better is required
To play 1080p HD video, a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor, 2GB of RAM, and an Intel GMA X4500HD, ATI Radeon HD 2400, or NVIDIA GeForce 8300 GS or better is required
Screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater; 1280x800 or greater is required to play an iTunes LP or iTunes Extras
16-bit sound card and speakers
Internet connection to use Apple Music, the iTunes Store, and iTunes Extras
iTunes-compatible CD or DVD recorder to create audio CDs, MP3 CDs, or backup CDs or DVDs. Songs from the Apple Music catalog cannot be burned to a CD.

Software:

Windows 10
64-bit editions of Windows require the iTunes 64-bit installer
400MB of available disk space
Some third-party visualizers may no longer be compatible with this version of iTunes. Please contact the developer for an updated visualizer that is compatible with iTunes 12.1 or later.
Apple Music, iTunes Store, and iTunes Match availability may vary by country
Apple Music trial requires sign-up and is available for new subscribers only. Plan automatically renews after trial.

iTunes is going places.

Visit the iTunes Store on iOS to buy and download your favorite songs, TV shows, movies, and podcasts. You can also download macOS Catalina for an all-new entertainment experience on desktop. Your library will transfer automatically to the new Apple Music app, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts. And you’ll still have access to your favorite iTunes features, including your previous iTunes Store purchases, rentals, and imports and the ability to easily manage your library.

Music, TV, and podcasts
take center stage.

iTunes forever changed the way people experienced music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts. It all changes again with three all-new, dedicated apps — Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts — each designed from the ground up to be the best way to enjoy entertainment on your Mac. And rest assured; everything you had in your iTunes library is still accessible in each app. iCloud seamlessly syncs everything across your devices — or you can back up, restore, and sync by connecting the device directly to your Mac.

The new Apple Music app is the ultimate music streaming experience on Mac.¹ Explore a library of over 75 million songs, discover new artists and tracks, find the perfect playlist, download and listen offline, or enjoy all the music you’ve collected over the years. And find it all in your music library on all your devices.

The Apple TV app for Mac is the new home for all your favorite movies, shows, premium channels, and Apple TV+. Watch everything directly in the app or enjoy it offline, and discover the best of what’s on in the Watch Now tab. You can even pick up where you left off on any screen, across all your devices. And for the first time, 4K² and Dolby Atmos³-supported movies are available on Mac.