A year in the making, we are proud to announce Fantastical. What started out as a university project turned into an app far surpassing our original concept and vision. In a future blog post, we’ll discuss the finer details of Fantastical — the concept, our process, and lots of inside info we think you’ll enjoy — but for now, here’s an outline of some of the details about Fantastical.

Fantastical is a calendar application for your Mac that leverages iCal, Entourage, and Outlook, letting you interact with your calendar in a whole new way. The event list and calendar are simple to use and, more importantly, beautifully designed, which comes in handy when you’re looking at something boring like an event.

To us, the feature of Fantastical that makes it a killer app is the natural language parsing engine. We’ve built an incredibly expressive and intelligent engine that lets you type the way you want without learning special syntax. Not only does Fantastical recognize a wide variety of dates and times, it handles locations and people in your Address Book!

The second big feature of Fantastical is its native CalDAV implementation. It was not trivial to implement, but we had to do it to ensure a flawless experience. With native CalDAV support, your events will be synced with your favorite CalDAV calendars (like MobileMe, Google Calendar, and Yahoo! Calendar) as long as they’re set up in iCal. With native CalDAV support, Fantastical will keep your events up to date even when iCal isn’t running.

We’re launching Fantastical with a special introductory price of $14.99 (US) which will end on June 1, 2011. We hope you enjoy Fantastical as much as we enjoyed making it. Grab your free trial now and give it a whirl!

Before we go, we want to extend our thanks to Israel Alonso (who did the wonderful website design you’re currently looking at), Rogie King (who did the beautiful artwork for Fantastical), and David Lanham of The Iconfactory (who did the fantastically fantastic icon for Fantastical).

One of the nice things about being an indie developer is getting to pick who we work with and we’re very glad to have been able to collaborate with Israel, Rogie, and David.

Until next time…