It’s been two weeks since we got our hands on the Apple Vision Pro and it’s safe to say that spatial computing has blown us away.

Of course we’ve been visualizing our schedules in a whole new way, thanks to Fantastical for Apple Vision Pro which debuted on launch day. But we haven’t forgotten about our contacts in all of the calendar excitement!

Soon after we got started turning Fantastical into a native Apple Vision Pro app, we turned our attention to Cardhop: the best way to add, edit, search, and interact with your contacts.

It’s exciting to be the only contacts app on Apple Vision Pro — and of course we think it’s the only one you’ll ever need. Your contacts will float right in front of you, literally jumping when you look at them. Who knew making a call could be this fun?

Everything you already know and love about Cardhop is there. You can add or edit contacts using natural language, search through them quickly and easily, and interact with them using a variety of Cardhop actions.

You just need to add your contact accounts to the Apple Vision Pro Settings app under Apps > Calendar > Accounts, then download Cardhop from the App Store on your device and sign in to your Flexibits Account to get started.

You can seamlessly make FaceTime video or audio calls, send emails, open websites, or look up addresses in Maps with just a glance and a tap.

View your recent contacts (with your preferred ways to interact!), send calendar invitations through Fantastical, take notes, see birthdays and anniversaries — anything you need to stay on top of your connections. Cardhop for Apple Vision Pro also has Focus Filtering, so you only see the contacts that matter at that moment.

It’s the best contacts experience we’ve ever made, and we’re thrilled to bring it to you as we continue our spatial computing journey.

If you have any ideas or feedback for Cardhop for Apple Vision Pro, let us know!

Today we’re excited to bring the best calendar app to the world of spatial computing. It’s Fantastical like you’ve never seen it before, completely reimagined for Apple Vision Pro.

Back in August, we revealed (with a little help from our friends at Apple, and the photo of Michael and Kent that’s been seen around the world) that we’d be bringing Fantastical to Apple Vision Pro as a native app. We’re proud to announce that it’s available now, and we think you are going to love it. Visualizing your schedule has never been easier or more intuitive.

Fantastical for Apple Vision Pro is a full-featured version of the app, just like on all your devices. Everything’s here, from calendar sets and conference calls, to Openings and Proposals, and fully enabled for the boundless canvas that is spatial computing. We also decided to take advantage of that canvas with a new feature: multiple windows.

That’s right, if you want to view a single day on the left, while keeping track of your entire week on the right, you can do it in Fantastical for Apple Vision Pro. Of course with each calendar having its own window, you can also move each one closer or further away, and resize them to best fit your needs.

Download Fantastical from the App Store on your new Apple Vision Pro, sign in to your Flexibits account, and you’re off and running — or, at least, fully immersed in the most amazing calendar experience we’ve ever made. Flexibits does not recommend or encourage running, or playing Pickleball, when using your Apple Vision Pro.

This is only the beginning of our spatial computing journey. We have a lot of ideas for how to keep you organized and on task.

If you have any ideas or feedback for Fantastical for Apple Vision Pro, let us know.

Stay tuned. We’re just getting started. 

In 2023, we’ve really focused on living up to the “flex” in Flexibits, with lots of updates centering around customization, accessibility, and new ways to view and use Fantastical and Cardhop on all your devices. For each month below, we’ll break down the big focus of the month, some quick wins we snuck in, and the most interesting fun fact from the month.

Start with a spin through our video recap, then read on for the month-by-month overview.

January

The big focus: We started the year off strong by honing in on accessibility — specifically, making tons of improvements to VoiceOver support. While we continued making VoiceOver improvements throughout the year, the big updates in January were improved VoiceOver support for Proposals, weather, and repeating tasks, as well as a more intuitive way to navigate between days or weeks.

A quick win: We also found some time to release an update that allows you to customize Openings and Proposals links.

Fun fact: In the wake of all the Twitter hullabaloo, we decided to ensure that Cardhop had full support for Mastodon usernames.

February

The big focus: Live Activities. When Apple launched the Dynamic Island and Live Activities in late 2022, we knew people would love to see their Fantastical events in this format — by February, we were ready to release our first version of Fantastical Live Activities:

We continued to improve this feature throughout the year, adding better localization and travel time support, push notifications, and expanding lead time from 1 to 8 hours.

A quick win: We added some extra support for Webex and Microsoft Teams to our conference call tools.

Fun fact: Drag and drop can be a fickle mistress! This month, we also fixed a few bugs related to drag and drop for a smoother user experience.

March

The big focus: Most of our work in March was focused on how Fantastical handles event locations. We improved the way Fantastical allows you to set locations for events, updated the way it interacts with Uber/Lyft when opening an event location, and added increased VoiceOver functionality when you open directions to an event’s location.

Quick wins: Cardhop got some keyboard shortcut updates and a UX polish, while Fantastical got some behind-the-scenes tweaks to make syncing devices and searching your calendar even easier.

Fun fact: We discovered (and fixed) a bug that would keep trying to calculate your travel time over and over and over… when no valid route could be found to your event location. Rare, but it happens!

April

The big focus: Openings! We wanted to update certain aspects of how you can customize an Openings template based on the use cases we were seeing most often. These updates included requesting vs. requiring a phone number from invitees and setting a limit to the number of guests that can book a given timeslot:

A quick win: We updated the Fantastical menu bar view to include time remaining in the current event.

Fun fact: It turns out, people have very different preferences when it comes to how their tasks are sorted in their calendar, so we added a new setting to allow you to choose the order in which your tasks are sorted.

May

The big focus: After giving Openings some love in April, we of course needed to turn our attention to our other fantastic calendaring feature: Proposals! Our release of Fantastical 3.7.13 included a few improvements to Proposals, including an update that introduced conference call options, so that when your Proposal is automatically added, your conference call details are there automatically too.

A quick win: We also introduced a cool new feature allowing your tasks to have a duration. All you have to do is add [##m] when you type in your task, and the parser will automatically add it to your calendar for the duration you’ve specified.

Fun fact: Cardhop got a neat little update in May that improved its calculation of Chinese lunar birthdays!

June

The big focus: In June, we enabled Day, Week, Month, and Quarter views in the Mini Window on Mac. We know the Mini Window is one of our most beloved features, and we’re psyched about the new layers of customizability that this release unlocked.

A quick win: One of the items we crossed off our June to-do list was to allow users to choose whether completed tasks are shown or not in the classic Today widget.

Fun fact: We spend so much time trying to improve the experience for existing users, it can be hard for us to find time to shift our focus back to the brand new users! That said, in June, we did spend some time improving the onboarding experience.

July

The big focus: Openings again! In July, we introduced a much-desired update that allows people to create Openings up to 180 days in advance. We also added support for Markdown syntax in Openings templates.

Quick wins: A lot of July’s quick wins were back in the VoiceOver category, where Year view, Quarter view, Go to Today, and Interesting Calendars all got some VoiceOver polish.

Fun fact: Well, this isn’t “fun,” exactly, but perhaps interesting to some — a challenge that all social media and contacts tools need to deal with is how to handle deceased users. In July, we made some updates to Cardhop to allow you to mark a contact as deceased, plus allow you to decide whether you want to hide or show Celebrations for deceased contacts.

August

The big focus: Migration Assistant. It’s a big priority of ours to make sure that Fantastical and Cardhop work seamlessly across your devices, and that includes when you switch devices. The Migration Assistant is there to ensure you can re-activate your Flexibits account when switching to a new device.

A quick win: In a similar vein, we also released an updated to allow users to have multiple sign-in methods enabled.

Fun fact: August is when Michael and Kent got a sneak peek of Fantastical on the Apple Vision Pro!

September

The big focus: As most Flexibits fans know, we like to time our biggest release of the year with Apple’s iOS updates in September, so this is always a big month for us! Our iOS17 update was packed with new features, especially those built to support newer display modes like interactive widgets in the home screen, the SmartStack widgets for Apple Watch, and StandBy widgets.

A quick win: In September, we were also able to greatly expand the location options that are available in an Openings template — video calls, phone calls, and in-person options are all now supported.

Fun fact: Yet another change we made in September is that when you enable travel time, you calendar will automatically use the previous event’s location as your starting point if possible. A small change, but a good one!

October

The big focus: With all the updates we made in September, October was predictably filled with customer support and bug fixes for the many widgets, complications, and new views that are now possible for Fantastical and Cardhop. We were especially focused on making sure the new-and-improved Apple Watch apps were functioning smoothly, and we’re happy to say they’re in a very stable, beautiful place. (Check out our recent post full of Fantastical-ified Watch faces if you haven’t already!)

A quick win: We reintroduced a fan favorite in October: the double month calendar widget. Now with interactivity!

Fun fact: October is the month that this particular blog writer discovered how opinionated the Flexibits staff is about time zones.

November

The big focus: Teaching Fantastical and Cardhop to speak European and Brazilian Portuguese. Localization is always a complicated task, and it’s even more complicated when you’re dealing with natural language processing — but we’re always trying to add more languages to the mix. Bem-vindo, Portuguese speakers!

Quick wins: We enabled the duplication of Openings templates, added support for WhatsApp call links, and created an option to see tomorrow morning’s events in the Watch App Up Next widget.

Fun fact: Did you know that there are in fact people that still print things out? On physical paper? In November, we made some tweaks to Cardhop’s print preview to make it more reliable.

December

The big focus: We’re currently focused on a few big projects that will be announced next year… so stay tuned!

A quick win: One thing we have already gotten done this month is improving how the Up Next widget in the Watch App handles a very busy schedule, because we know a lot of you are very, very busy.

Fun fact: Rotating from vertical to horizontal views on the iPhone can introduce some unexpected behavior in the way you view your apps. Another thing we’ve already checked off the list this month is some improvements to how Fantastical responds to iPhone rotation.

…and believe it or not, this list is only scratching the surface of what we accomplished this year!

We truly couldn’t do it without your support, whether you’ve subscribed to Premium, told a friend how great our apps are, or contacted us to ask a question or give feedback — so we’ll close the year out by saying thank you. We can’t wait to see what 2024 brings!

iOS 17 features some real winners, including FaceTime voicemails, FaceTime calls on Apple TV, and voice message transcription. (Cue everyone who detests sitting through their chattiest friend’s voice messages breathing their sigh of relief.)

It also looks like Apple is heading in a more flexible and modular display direction. No longer will our devices be confined to merely “Lock” and “Home” screens, but instead they can be configured to show us precisely what we want when we want it.

For our part, we’ve released updates that focus in particular on…

• Widgets: Given the move towards breaking the Lock/Home screen binary, widgets have played a big part in Apple’s display updates. iOS 17 has a lot of improved Widgets support, including interactivity so that you don’t have to go all the way into an app to perform small actions.
• StandBy: This is Apple’s new display mode that gives a customizable smart display for when your device is charging and not in use. This mode is designed to give you a quick information at-a-glance.

Let’s start tearing open that wrapping paper, shall we?

Apple Watch Update

Apple Watch users, the wait is finally over. We’ve refreshed our Fantastical Apple Watch app to make it much easier to keep an eye on your calendar when you’re on the go.

Fantastical’s Smart Stack widgets will give you a sleek peek of your calendar without cluttering your watch face with too many complications. Here’s what our Up Next Timeline Smart Stack widget looks like:

Other Smart Stack widgets you’ll be able to use are Today’s Date, Up Next, and Launch Fantastical.

For the maximalists out there, you can now have multiple Fantastical complications on your watch face, with each one showing different information. We’ve got five different complications showing here… what’s your high score?

There are a total of eight different watch face complications for you to choose from.

Widgets Galore

Widgets are receiving a serious glow-up in this release, and we’ve decked out our widget features to match.

Interactive Widgets

With the new interactive widgets, you can now complete tasks directly from your home screen Widgets.

Our Calendar + Event List widget lets you select a date and see those events directly in the widget itself, and quickly switch between dates to see what’s coming up.

This interactivity works not only on your iPhone, but in Sonoma on your Mac as well.

StandBy

Obviously, the first thought you had when you heard about StandBy was: “Gosh, I hope they make StandBy widgets for Fantastical and Cardhop!” Of course we did.

StandBy is available on all of your devices that are running iOS 17. To add Fantastical and Cardhop widgets to StandBy, just add them while your device is in StandBy (the same way you’d add them to the Home screen).

There are five different widget types for Fantastical in StandBy:

• Event List
• Up Next
• Calendar
• Icon
• Date

And three different widget types for Cardhop in StandBy:

• Celebrations
• Cardhop actions
• Business card QR code

Remember that your device needs to be locked, charging, and rotated into landscape mode for StandBy to work.

iPad Lock Screen Widgets

We didn’t forget about you, iPad lovers! Our latest updates also include support for iPad Lock widgets:

Quick Hits: Openings, Live Activities, and Alert Sounds

Don’t worry, the widget mania didn’t keep us from updating other key elements of your Flexibits experience.

Openings now supports adding multiple conference call options on each template, as well as the ability to add a call-in method and/or an in-person location. Invitees can choose from any of these options when booking an Opening with you.

Live activities has also been updated to show your upcoming events up to 8 hours ahead, instead of only 1 hour ahead. This will make it way easier to see all upcoming events throughout your entire day in the Dynamic Island (if your device supports it).

Last but not least, we’ve added louder, longer alert sounds to Fantastical iOS to help make sure your day stays on track. Check out the soothing Music Box (Long) alert sound:

We’ve also got Airport (Long) and Foghorn (Long) for those of you that need something a little more attention-grabbing.

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That’s all we’ve got for now! We hope you have as much fun exploring iOS 17 as we’ve had preparing our updates for it.

Just kidding.

Signing in is a necessary evil; we want it to create as little friction as possible, but it does carry important security and password management implications. How can you make sure your sign in process is both smooth and secure?

Smooth Sign In on Flexibits

We recently released an update that makes your signing in to your Flexibits account much easier. You’ve got three options for sign in: you can sign in with Google, with Apple, or you can sign in directly with your email and password. You can find all three options in the Security & Devices section of your Flexibits Account hub.

Where previously, it was a little tricky to change your sign in method after you’d signed up, it’s now much simpler to change your password or your sign in method whenever you need. Just head to Security & Devices and update your settings in the Sign In Methods section. You can also activate multiple sign-in methods to maximize overall convenience.

Why might you go with one sign in method over another? There are a lot of factors to consider, and everyone’s preferences vary. (Note: this is not official medical, legal, financial, or relationship advice. Contact your doctor if — err, contact our Support team if you have any specific questions. )

What is the benefit of signing in with Google or Apple?

Signing in with Google or Apple, also called “third party login” or SSO (single sign-on), is a great option for convenience.

If you’re already logged in to a Google or Apple account on a given browser or device, signing in with Google or Apple gets you in with just a few quick taps. It’s as close as we can get to the minimal friction dream (until the entire internet is equipped with fancy biometric security and we’re all basically Tom Cruise in Minority Report, of course).

Don’t worry — the convenience of third party login does not come at the expense of security. All apps and websites that use third party login follow a set of industry standards around OAuth 2.0, which basically just allow the third party to sign in on your behalf. The site or app you’re signing in to never sees your third party credentials — instead, the third party creates an encrypted key called an OAuth token, and the app or site stores that instead.

Ultimately, your comfort with the security of third party login comes down to your comfort with the security practices of the third party itself. With Google and Apple being the large and well-established companies that they are, they’ve obviously got very sophisticated security systems and huge teams dedicated to preserving that security.

That said, if a true Mr. Robot style team of hackers ever wanted to pull a full Fight Club, they’d target large companies like Google and Apple first. (Clearly cybersecurity’s got us in a sci-fi mood. )

Keep in mind that if you ever delete or get suspended from your Google or Apple account, you’d need to reconfigure any accounts for which you were signing in via Google or Apple.

What is the benefit of logging in directly with an email and password?

The standard sign in method, where you log directly into a service with your email (or username) and password, is a good option for those that are looking for maximal security on their own terms. Plus, if you have a password manager that you like, signing in with an email and password can be just as convenient as third party login. 1Password, LastPass, and Dashlane are all great options.

Here are a few quick notes on what NOT to do when it comes to standard sign in:

Don’t use the same password for multiple apps or websites — if one of those sites gets hacked, all of the accounts for which you used that password can be compromised.

Don’t rely on your memory as a password manager — there are simply too many things to sign in to these days. Our brains are powerful, but not that powerful. Plus, they’re not really built for memorizing long lists of specific information anyways.

Don’t use easy-to-crack passwords like…

• buttercup1964 — Passwords with names and dates are easy to socially engineer.
• skh85!netflix, skh85!hulu, skh85!hbo, etc.  — Using passwords that follow a predictable pattern may help you remember them, but it’s not much better than just using the same password for everything.
• k8wd*9 — Short strings of random symbols and letters are harder for you to remember, and easier for brute force systems to crack.

Of course, just as with third party login, the security of standard sign in is only as secure as the company you’re signing in to. If you’re worried that a company has subpar privacy or security practices, you may want to opt for a trusted third party login method instead.

Luckily, as far as Flexibits is concerned, you have nothing to worry about on the privacy front. All passwords and OAuth tokens are stored only on your devices, not on our servers, meaning we couldn’t even access your password if we wanted to (and thus, neither could hackers).

Signing in to your Flexibits account vs. Adding accounts to Fantastical

Word to the wise — signing in to your Flexibits account is different from signing in to add accounts to Fantastical.

With Fantastical open, head to Settings > Accounts to add any of the accounts below:

When you select the account you want to add, you’ll be redirected to sign in to that account (maybe even via third party login!). Once you’ve signed in, you can add calendars from that account, attach Zoom meetings or Webex meetings to your events, integrate tasks from Todoist, and more.

That’s all from us today! Signing off for now (since it’ll be a breeze to sign back in again anyways ).

We recently had the exciting opportunity to visit the Apple Vision Pro labs in Cupertino, and let us tell you — the future is here, and yes, it is really cool.

Some developers who visit the labs are building tools specifically for spatial computing, but for our part, we were lucky enough to see Fantastical working on visionOS right out of the box. Of course, as we began to imagine what a delightful productivity experience in three dimensions could look like, the opportunities for new and innovative design choices felt limitless.

“Experiencing spatial computing helped us start thinking not just about left to right or up and down, but beyond borders at all,” says Michael Simmons, our CEO.

“Can people look at a whole week spatially? Can people compare their current day to the following week? What if you have the whole week wrap around you in 360 degrees? I could probably — not kidding — talk for two hours about this.”

We’ll save the two-hour convo for another time, but as you can tell, our wheels are spinning! What about you — any features you’d like to see us to create for visionOS? Let us know! We’d love to bring your vision to life.

Read more about Michael and Kent’s visit to the Apple Vision Pro labs here.

Today is no different, because in this blog post we’ll be showing some new features and changes we’ve made over the course of this year… but we’ll be looking at Fantastical from a different perspective.

We’ve spent the last several updates improving accessibility support, to help make Fantastical better for visually disabled users relying on VoiceOver when using their devices. Accessibility is something we’re committed to, so while there are several changes we are discussing today, there will also be more improvements coming in the future.

To get started, make sure you’re running Fantastical version 3.7.16 or higher on your iOS devices to access the features we’ll be describing here!

Accessibility Navigation

Fantastical has several different layouts to display information about your events and tasks. DayTicker and Calendar are quite dense: you have a few days (DayTicker) or a full calendar at the top giving you a clue (the more stripes or dots you have, the busier you are), and below this there’s your full event list.

If you’re not relying on VoiceOver, it’s easy. In DayTicker the leftmost day is the first one in the list below, and so on. You see three stripes, then you gaze down a bit and you immediately see what your three events are.

If you’re relying on VoiceOver however, things are a lot harder. You can swipe through DayTicker and hear VoiceOver describing your days (e.g. “July 12, 2023, two events”, “July 13, 2023, one event”) but then there’s no easy way for you to actually understand what these events are. Continuing to swipe left/right will navigate the DayTicker moving forward in to the future (it’s an infinite list), so you’re left with placing your finger randomly on the screen hoping to hit the list below DayTicker or Calendar.

As of Fantastical 3.7.16 we’ve changed how this works. Days in DayTicker and Calendar are now marked as buttons, so to reuse the previous example, VoiceOver now reads “July 13, 2023, one event, button.” This makes a big difference, because you now know that you can double tap on the screen to activate the element. Activating this element will move focus to the first event of the day in the list below. In short, it acts like a link to your event.

Check out this video for how it works in practice, so you can hear what VoiceOver says when using the new element.

Another big improvement is how we handle Go To Today, and navigating to specific days in general. When you tap (or double tap, for VoiceOver users) on the header you’ll jump back to today. Not a big deal if you’re a sighted user, as you’ll notice the content scrolling and then can carry on with your task.

For VoiceOver users however, this is frustrating: you don’t know the content has scrolled and you have navigated to today because the focus remains on the button that triggered the action. You’re left trying to place your finger on the screen hoping to hit the today element, or anywhere close enough, so you can navigate to it.

We’ve changed this so now every view moves focus to Today’s element, and you’ll be able to continue navigating through your days with low effort. This change is demonstrated in the following video: we start in Month View, and when navigating to Today it moves focus to today, where we can then navigate through each event.

No matter your layout preference, navigating to Today will always provide you information about your day, regardless of your abilities.

The same change also applies to the Go to Date option. If you double tap and hold on the header you’ll be presented with a date picker. Once you’re done choosing your date, focus will now be on the new date in your current view. The following video walks you through going to a specific day in Week view.

Empty days in DayTicker

We’ve made a small change for the DayTicker view in Fantastical, but it should help reduce confusion with this view. When navigating through DayTicker, if you land on a day that has no events you’ll now hear VoiceOver saying something like “July 14, 2023, no events.” You’ll no longer be left wondering why there’s a gap in your week, even if VoiceOver provided you the audio feedback of having moved its cursor “somewhere on the screen.”

Quarter view

Quarter View is now a bit more useful on iOS for VoiceOver users. You were previously able to navigate through quarters, day by day. However we were not providing any specific information about each day, making this view not very helpful.

This has changed, and now VoiceOver will read a brief summary of each day, similar to what the DayTicker view does.

Year view

We’ve also made the Year view on iOS more accessible. In older versions, VoiceOver would only read month names, providing no information about days in each month. It was not very useful, as you would only hear “January, February, March, April…”

Now you can navigate through the days similarly to DayTicker and Quarter View: VoiceOver will read the day and the number of events for that day. And you can leverage accessibility navigation too! Double tapping on a day will switch to Calendar View, focusing the day. You’re only another double tap away from jumping to the list to learn more about your day.

Interesting Calendars

For our Premium subscribers, we have overhauled our Interesting Calendars feature on both macOS and iOS, making subscribing to these calendars completely accessible. VoiceOver users are now able to browse Interesting Calendars, hear a preview of them, and subscribe or unsubscribe easily.

Parsed tokens

Finally, did you know you could type / in the parser to quickly set the calendar you’re creating the event on? Well, on iOS this would cause VoiceOver to read “attachment.png,” and on macOS it would read “embedded.” We’ve fixed this so now VoiceOver will read the actual content of the token on both platforms; for example, typing “Lunch with Chrissie /work” in the parser is now read as “Lunch, invitee: Chrissie M, calendar: Work” when VoiceOver is involved.

The same applies to date tokens, which get added when you long tap to create events (iOS) or double click to create events (macOS). Those will now be read correctly when using VoiceOver with Fantastical.

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We hope the latest changes have helped make Fantastical better for all of our users, and will be continuing to improve accessibility in our apps with future updates.

If you ever run into an issue with accessibility, or the apps in general, just reach out to our Support team and we will be happy to help!

To access the latest Fantastical features in this post, make sure you’re running our latest version (3.7.14). Go ahead and install that update if you haven’t already, and let’s dig into some exciting new content!

Conference calls for Proposals

Fantastical’s Proposals feature is a great way to quickly schedule an event with a group of invitees, and now we’ve made the process even easier by giving you the option to include a conference call when creating your proposal. That’s right — you no longer need to wait until the proposal has been confirmed on a specific date to add a call to the scheduled event! 

With the new conference call feature, you just need to select your preferred conference call option during the proposal creation.

When the event is confirmed, your meeting link will be created and included in the event invitation so that your invitees have immediate access to the call details.

We currently support adding Zoom and Webex links (if you have those account types added directly to Fantastical), as well as Google Meet (on calendars connected to a Google account) and Microsoft Teams (on calendars connected to a Microsoft account).

Customize your Openings and Proposal links

While we’re on the topic of Fantastical Scheduling, you can now customize your Openings and Proposal links for specific invitees before sending it.

The available options for your Openings links include the name, email, and phone number of your invitee, as well as the option to add a message to the link.  For Proposal links, you can fill in the name and email of your invitee, as well as add a message to the link. To make it even better, we’ve added the option to set the language for the link using one of our currently supported languages.

When you send a customized link, we fill in the invitee information you provide so all your invitee needs to do is select their preferred date & time and submit the request.

Check out our Support page for tips on how to customize your links!

Durations for Tasks 

One feature that we’ve received a lot of requests for is the ability to set a specific duration for your tasks in Fantastical. We’re happy to announce that this feature has been added to the app. 

That’s right: you can now have your task show for a specific amount of time in Fantastical’s Day and Week views to help with planning and time blocking.

To use the new duration option, enter the task name followed by [duration] in the parser. For example, if you want to create a task with a 60-minute duration you could do so by entering the following in the Fantastical parser:

task Clean the garage [60m] tomorrow at 10am

Now, the task will show as having a duration of 60 minutes in both the Day view and Week view in Fantastical across all versions of the app.

Just make sure you place the duration directly after the task title when creating your task to activate the new feature in Fantastical.

Flexibits Teams Premium Subscription

Finally, we’re excited to introduce the Flexibits Teams subscription that is now available on our website. The Teams plan lets you manage multiple subscriptions for your entire team with one main account.

Get started on our Teams information page and once you create the main Flexibits Account to manage the subscription, you can change the amount of seats at any time directly in your Flexibits Account billing section. Each seat gives a user a private Flexibits Account that they will use to access the premium features in Fantastical, Fantastical Scheduling, and Cardhop.

Learn more

If you are interested in learning more about what is included in each release, you can find out more with our Release Notes on the website.

You can also keep an eye on the Flexireads blog for future Feature Roundup posts to keep track of new features available from Flexibits!

This year saw a number of significant updates to Fantastical and Cardhop, along with the introduction of Fantastical Scheduling — a brand new service to help streamline your scheduling with others. 

For a quick (and spiffy!) recap of some of the headlining features we introduced throughout the year, be sure to check out our year-in-review video:

Exciting, right? Now, let’s take a more detailed look back and see what transpired throughout 2022!

January

We kicked off the year by continuing to enhance our extensive call service functionality, introducing support for Workspace Rooms, 3CX, and MiTeam Meetings. Zoom users were happy to discover they could schedule meetings on behalf of other users, too!

Our Todoist devotees also found a nice surprise to ring in the new year: the ability to add notes to Todoist tasks (perfect for adding a reminder of that New Year’s resolution to the shopping list!).

February

Big things were in store for February! Fantastical 3.6 brought with it the introduction of Fantastical Scheduling — a comprehensive suite of tools to streamline your meeting planning. 

Fantastical Scheduling included the all-new Openings, a completely overhauled Proposals, and a Quarter view. Each of these three features worked seamlessly together to take the back-and-forth out of organizing meetings. 

By sending an Openings link to others, people can see exactly when you are available and request time on your calendar. Fantastical can then book the meeting automatically and send out the invite — no more endless messaging to try and find a time that works for everyone!

March

Following the launch of Fantastical Scheduling, our team went right into maintenance mode, ensuring that any issues or concerns reported by our users were resolved right away, including a number of improvements and minor adjustments to Fantastical Scheduling.

However, we still managed to find a bit of time to add support for a requested app integration in Cardhop: support for messaging and calling using the Signal app!

April

With Fantastical Scheduling out in the wild and the initial post-launch maintenance taken care of, we were able to turn our attention back to some other items we had on our to-do list. 

In April we made it possible to add conference calls to event templates, gave Google Calendar users the ability to set guest permissions directly in Fantastical, and our iOS users were pleased to discover that Fantastical finally gained the ability to dismiss all in-app notifications in one go — hooray!

May

May proved to be a quieter month in terms of new releases, but behind the scenes our team was as busy as ever, making sure Fantastical and Cardhop were ready for whatever WWDC 2022 would announce in June.

June

As the summer was kicking off, we added a bunch of new Fantastical Scheduling features based on feedback from our users. This included the automatic addition of video calls to Openings appointments, the option to include break time between appointments (so no more missed lunches!), and further detail to time slot availability in Openings. We also managed to squeeze in Butter video call support, and improved how the event list behaves on Apple Watch.

Oh, and a little thing called WWDC happened, too.

July

July was full of all sorts of exciting discussions about the WWDC announcements: our team couldn’t wait to implement them in Fantastical and Cardhop!

However, we didn’t let the month pass us by without making a few enhancements to Fantastical’s VoiceOver support, thanks to the expert guidance and input from some of our assistive tech users.

August

The release dates of iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura were quickly approaching, and in addition to putting the final touches on those important updates for Fantastical and Cardhop, we also enhanced Fantastical’s Accessibility settings when using Openings, made further VoiceOver improvements, and tweaked our German localization.

Although August was a quieter month for Fantastical, Cardhop had its chance in the spotlight with the release of Cardhop 2.1. Cardhop 2.1 introduced a host of new features that contact nerds everywhere were geeking out about: the new Celebrations view, Microsoft Teams actions, and a QR code widget for iPhone that let you share your business card right from your Home Screen were the headlining features. Cardhop 2.1 also improved the integration between Cardhop and Fantastical by letting users create a task or event in Fantastical directly from Cardhop, with the created item linking back to a specific contact. Perfect for making a quick to-do in your calendar to call a friend or co-worker!

September

September was another big month! Our planning and engineering efforts finally paid off as we released Fantastical 3.7 and Cardhop 2.2 alongside iOS 16.

September’s updates to Fantastical and Cardhop introduced Lock Screen widgets, Focus filters, and an in-app Openings editor for Fantastical. We also released the Fantastical Openings keyboard to let you instantly see and share your Openings links from inside any app! Openings was fully localized into all Fantastical’s supported languages, and we even found time to sneak in another video call service in the form of Chorus.

October

As October came into view, macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16 were released to the world. As with the previous month, Fantastical and Cardhop had major updates to ensure users could take full advantage of the new features Apple introduced.

Fantastical and Cardhop users on iPad and Mac now had access to more widgets, Focus filters, App Shortcuts, and much more. Discord also arrived in Cardhop, making it easy to interact with your servers or send a message right from your favorite contacts app!

November

After a busy couple of months, we focused on supporting our recent releases in November. 

However, we still found some time to make a few enhancements to how our apps worked with the new Apple Watch Ultra (just in case you wanted to check your shopping list during a dive or the final leg of your ultramarathon ), and also added support for the Beacon and Gong conference call services!

December

As the end of the year approached, we put out our final update for the year to address a few minor issues reported by some of our users, and we started to execute our plan for how 2023 will unfold — we can’t wait to share more in the future!

Finally, and as always, we sincerely thank all of you for your support and dedication to Fantastical, Cardhop, and helping us to continually optimize your productivity workflows on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac. You are all an inspiration to us, and we appreciate you greatly. We wish you all the best, and a very happy New Year! See you in 2023!

For the first time ever, we’re putting Flexibits Premium on sale at the lowest price we’ve ever offered it — 50% off an annual subscription (commitment pays off!) or 50% off your first month of a monthly subscription!

Our Black Friday sale starts today and will run throughout Black Friday and Cyber Monday, coming to an end on November 30th. Purchases need to be made through flexibits.com.

We will be making adjustments to our pricing on January 3, 2023 due to the current trajectory of rising prices across the globe. So, if you’ve been considering subscribing to Flexibits Premium, now is definitely the best time to get the most value for your money — and take advantage of all the extra features that Flexibits Premium provides in both Fantastical and Cardhop!

As a small independent business, we greatly appreciate your support by subscribing to Flexibits Premium. We hope you enjoy this special offer and we wish you a very happy holiday season!