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. 

How many times have you been in the middle of a work project, or just relaxing at home, and you get interr—bzzt—right. As I was saying, you’re in the middle of trying to do—bzzt—sigh. Sometimes the notifications just won’t stop.

Once upon a time, it was easy. You could only add a few apps to your devices, and receiving a notification was exciting. Now, every shopping app and social network is sending constant bzzts to your phone, watch, computer, and every other device you have, begging for your attention. 

That’s why we wanted to take some time for a deep dive into the world of Apple Focus. Apple introduced Focus modes and filters a few years ago, and they’re wildly powerful — but also wildly complicated — so let’s go through how you can use Focus and Fantastical to better manage your schedule (and those distracting notifications). 

What is Focus anyway?

Think of Focus as a sort of mode selector for your Apple devices. In the same way that the iPhone’s ringer switch let’s you silence your alerts, Focus allows you to choose from different modes like Work, Personal, or Sleep, with different app and notification settings for each focus. The settings are simple but powerful. 

When using a focus, you can choose to block or allow notifications for messages or phone calls from specific contacts. For example on your Work Focus, you could block the family group chat whose members who won’t stop talking, and choose to only allow calls from your work colleagues and your kid’s day care.

It works the same with notifications from apps: In a Personal Focus you might choose to block notifications from apps like Slack, or to only allow notifications from certain close family and friends to prioritize personal connections.

Then there’s a super-useful feature called Focus Filters that allows apps to be customized to your particular focus. In Fantastical, this means you have the ability to choose which calendar set you are seeing in Fantastical when using a specific focus on your device. In your Work Focus, you could choose to enable the calendar set that hides your kid’s soccer schedule, while in your Personal Focus, you could ensure that shared work calendars are all hidden away.

Focus allows you to customize everything related to notifications and configure your apps in just a couple of quick steps. Once you have your focus set up, it just takes a quick tap/click in the Control Center on your device to enable it. To make it even easier, you can have a focus activate automatically at a particular time or location.

But no matter what focus you are using, you’ll need your notifications from Fantastical, right? 

Focus and Fantastical

We want to make sure you have your focus set up so that you’re always on top of your schedule. So to get started, on the Mac you’ll head to Mac System Settings > Focus, while on iPhone or iPad, you’ll go to iOS Settings > Focus. 

While you can choose to share your Focus status between all your devices — so the active focus on your Mac will also be active on your iPhone, the notification settings are separate across your devices. This means you’ll need to configure your allowed notifications on each device individually.

For notifications, you have three main options:

– All Fantastical Alerts: All notifications from Fantastical are marked as Time Sensitive, so if you choose to allow Time Sensitive Notifications in a particular Focus mode, you’ll receive all your Fantastical alerts like normal.

– Alerts only for calendars in your Focus: If you give Fantastical permission to send notifications or you choose to block only certain apps (and not Fantastical), and have Time Sensitive Notifications disabled, you will receive alerts for calendars included in the enabled Focus only.

– No Fantastical alerts at all: If you turn off Time Sensitive Notifications and you don’t add Fantastical to your approved app list for notifications (or add it to your blocked list), you won’t get any alerts from your calendars no matter how important they might be.

For Calendar Sets, it’s a little more straightforward. Using the Focus Filters feature, you can choose what calendar sets are available when a particular focus is on.

For example, you could hide everything but your Work calendar set when in the Work focus, or only show your Home calendar set when not at the Office. If you only pick one calendar set to show in a particular focus, you’ll ensure that it displays whenever you’re in that mode.

A Day of Focus

Now that you know how to set up a focus with Fantastical, let’s take a look at what this might look like in action for someone that works from home.

Thanks to the focus schedule you set, your Work focus automatically activates at 9 a.m. When you open Fantastical, you’re automatically viewing your Work calendar set because you enabled it in the Focus Filter setting. Now you are only seeing your work events in Fantastical, helping you maximize your productivity.

Even though you can’t see your personal events, you still don’t need to worry about missing something important since you have Time Sensitive Notifications allowed on your focus. You may not see your upcoming doctor’s appointment on your current calendar set, but you’ll still get that Time to Leave notification when you need to head out the door.

Once you make it to your appointment, you switch to your Personal Focus on your iPhone. This toggles your Fantastical calendar set from Work to Home, hiding all your shared calendars from the office so you can stop thinking about work for a few minutes. Switching focus might even save you some embarrassment when scheduling your follow up visit so you can make sure you don’t add the next appointment to the calendar you share with your boss!

After the appointment is over and you’ve made it back to your home office, toggle back to the Work Focus and your calendar set once again switches to your Work set for maximum productivity.

At 5:30 PM, your Personal focus is set to switch on automatically, reminding you to wrap up work for the day and letting you focus on any personal items you still need to take care of.

Find the focus that works best for you!

We’ve just scratched the surface with the incredible power of Focus today. There are so many options to choose from, like automatically activating a Driving focus in the car, or using a specific focus when you have an active Workout. You can even set up a Reading focus that activates when you open your Books app!

You can get more information on how to set up Fantastical with Focus in the Flexibits Support pages, and of course Apple’s Support pages have extensive explanations of all the ins and outs of Focus.

Investing a little time in your Focus modes can lead to significant productivity gains as you quiet some of those constant notifications, letting you see everything you do need and nothing you don’t. 

Good luck getting focused!

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!

Proposals is the perfect tool for the holidays, when everyone’s got tons of family, friend, and work obligations competing for time on their schedule. Rather than just list all the cool features of Proposals for you, we thought we’d spice it up — why not try a little holiday-themed Choose Your Own Adventure post?

The adventure: It’s your turn to plan the Annual Soup Lovers Potluck.

You and a group of like-minded soup fanatics get together every December to share new soup recipes, talk about innovations in the soup industry, and sample soups to your heart’s content.

Of course, with it being the holidays, the task of finding a 2-hour block of time that will work for everyone in the Soup Lovers Club is a daunting one.

First off, you need to find a time that works for the most important person in this scenario: you, the organizer of this year’s potluck!

You start by clicking and dragging on the open parts of your calendar to automatically create a proposal.

All of the time slots in your proposal will stay on your calendar with a PROPOSED signifier at the top until a time is chosen.

Now that you’ve got a smorgasbord of times that work for you, it’s time to…

Choose your own adventure!

If you want the organizing of this potluck to involve as few steps as possible, skip to Scenario A.

If you want this to be the biggest, most raucous Annual Soup Lovers Potluck of all time, skip to Scenario B.

If you’re primarily concerned with making sure no soup-lovers get left behind in the scheduling frenzy, skip to Scenario C.

Scenario A: You send invites to everyone in the Soup Lovers Club and set the event to schedule itself automatically.

To get this potluck scheduled as quickly and painlessly as possible, you add all of the soup lovers to the proposal as invitees, then set add event to “When replies are unanimous”:

Once you’ve added your invitees and created the Proposal, your invitees receive an email where they can pick the times that work for them:

Once everyone has picked a time, the event automatically gets scheduled in a time slot where everyone is available. Easy as pie! Err — soup!

Head to Outcome A.

Scenario B: You create a Fantastical link so that everyone in the Soup Lovers club can invite as many soup enthusiasts they want.

The Soup Lovers club are the some of the wildest, most well-connected people you know, so you decide you want them to be able to invite whoever they want to this year’s potluck.

You add all of the core club members to the invite directly, then click “Create Fantastical link” in the event settings:

Your event will automatically be set to manual approval. Why? Because you have no idea how many people the soup lovers are going to invite, so the event would never know when the responses were unanimous!

The Soup Lovers Club then sends the Fantastical link to anyone they want. The link looks similar to the direct invite, but with Name and Email fields so that you, the organizer, have a sense of who will be joining.

You monitor the responses as they come in by clicking on any of the proposed times in Fantastical:

Once you’ve amassed a quorum a soup lovers, you schedule the potluck on the most popular time and buckle up for a soup extravaganza!

Head to Outcome B.

Scenario C: You copy the Proposal times as text and send them to the less tech-savvy soup lovers directly.

As you set out to schedule the potluck, you can’t help but think of Linda the ladle-collector and Boris the borscht-connoisseur, who still use physical cookbooks and handwritten recipes. They’ve probably checked their joint email account once in the last year, but they do like to text you pictures of their adorable grandchildren.

To make sure Linda and Boris aren’t left out, you control-click your Proposal as you’re creating it so you can Copy Proposed Times as Text:

With a quick paste, you send them a text with the times:

Very few clicks to include a very important pair of soup-lovers! You have to factor in Linda and Boris’s reply separately from the rest of the group, but that’s okay — they’re worth it.

Head to Outcome C.

Outcome A…

Since the scheduling of the potluck was such a breeze, you had extra time to make not only your world-famous mulligatawny soup, but also hand-embroidered Soup Lovers Club napkins for everyone as holiday gifts! Everyone agrees that you deserve the All-Time Best Potluck Organizer award.

Outcome B…

The word gets out about your soup-stravaganza, and soon the whole town is lining up to be a part of it. People share the invite link around like candy, and you end up needing to upgrade the venue from a room in the rec hall to taking over the entire community center. Legend has it that the crazier soup lovers even had an after-hours soup-keg-stand competition…

Outcome C…

Linda and Boris are so touched that you went out of their way to include them that they gift you an old ladle that has been passed down in Linda’s family for many generations. Years later, you bring it to an antiques shop for an appraisal and discover it’s worth a small fortune! You use the money to help send Linda and Boris’s adorable grandchildren to college. A little extra effort can truly go a long way, no?

No matter what your holiday plans or potluck preferences, we hope these Proposals pointers have proved both pleasant and pragmatic.

If you want to look closer at any of the features in our adventures above, check out our Help Book entry on Proposals, and don’t hesitate to contact our Support team if any issues arise.

Here’s to a holiday full of adventures!

Today’s post is also for all the Apple Watch people out there — and we know you’re out there, because our Support team has been chatting with a lot of you about how to get the most out of Fantastical on your Apple Watch. Whether you’ve never configured a single complication or you’re a champion of customization, we’re sure you’ll find something new to try in this post.

So, what kind of Fantastical setup is best for you on the Apple Watch? Start by picking your favorite of these four productivity methods:

• Time Blocking
• Eat the Frog
• Biological Prime Time
• Medium Method

Then look below to see the configuration we recommend!

If you like Time Blocking…

What is Time Blocking? Proactively scheduling your day into specific blocks where you focus on one thing at a time.

What this productivity method says about you: Some of the most important aspects of your job involve deep work, but you’re a busy person. You abhor interruptions, distractions, and context-switching. You’re likely a visual thinker who likes clean (possibly colorful) aesthetics.

How your should set up your Apple Watch: We recommend filling your watch face with complications that are all geared towards helping you maintain your focus, while your Smart Stack gives you an aesthetically pleasing glance at the day.

• Use the Today’s Date complication, especially if you’re a day-theming time-blocker.
• Include the Up Next complication to help you stay on top of the exact task you’re meant to focus on in each time block.
• Having the Up Next Timeline widget in your Smart Stack will help you get a quick glance at the other time blocks you have coming up as well.

Shown below is a watch with that configuration, along with mindfulness and music complications to help keep you focused. All this on the lovely Palette face — a clean, colorful aesthetic that will match your time-blocked calendar nicely.

If you like to Eat the Frog…

What is Eat the Frog? No one likes to eat the frog, and that’s the point. This productivity method is all about doing the hardest thing(s) first.

What this productivity method says about you: You’re prone to procrastination, and you tend to feel distracted by your own tendency to procrastinate. You benefit from having a firm yet helpful hand to make sure you actually get the boring things on your To-Do list done.

How your should set up your Apple Watch: It’s important that your watch face helps direct you to the things you need to get done and nothing else. Avoid clutter — save that for the Smart Stack.

• Use the Today’s Remaining Tasks complication to keep yourself focused on the remaining To-Do list items of the day — and no other complications. That way, a look at your watch simply tells you what time it is and how much there’s left to do.
• Swipe to the Smart Stack for the Today’s Date widget and Up Next widget that will help you put the frogs you still have to eat in the context of the rest of your day and week.

Below, we have a watch with just these features displayed on the Solar Analog watch face. Bonus: the Solar Analog face changes with the position of the sun — another subtle nudge to remind you that time is passing! And it’s green. Like a frog. And “Solar Analog” rhymes with frog. The perks are truly endless.

If you like to track your Biological Prime Time…

What is Biological Prime Time? Tracking data about how your energy ebbs and flows throughout the day, then setting up your schedule to adhere to your body’s natural tendencies.

What this productivity method says about you: You love data, charts, and graphs. You’re in tune with your body and you often adjust your schedule and prioritize tasks based on fitness, health, and physical well-being.

How you should set up your Apple Watch: We say fill your watch face up with complications. The more tracking, the better!

• The Launch Fantastical complication can help you quickly open up your calendar and take notes on how much energy you had during different events throughout your day — another tool to help with your tracking.
• Include the Today’s Remaining Events complication so you can quickly gauge how much more energy you need through the day.
• Use the Up Next complication to see how much time you have before you need to muster up energy for your next event.

Here’s what that configuration looks like, plus a fitness tracker and compass, on the Modular watch face. With all these complications, you don’t even really need a Smart Stack.

If you like the Medium Method…

What is the Medium Method? Using the perfect blend of digital and analog to track tasks, set priorities, and optimize your schedule.

What this productivity method says about you: You don’t care what anyone says — a pen and paper is still the best way to take notes. You’re not a luddite, but to you, sitting down with a notepad and some post-its is the best way to get things done and prepare for a busy week.

How your should set up your Apple Watch: Lean into your analog proclivities, both stylistically and functionally, while still getting all the benefits of wearing such a smart watch.

• Throw the Today’s Date complication up on the watch face to complement the analog clock.
• The Today’s Remaining Tasks + Events complication will give you a quick look at the goals and priorities you set for this day without bogging you down.
• Put the Launch Fantastical widget in your Smart Stack so you can get deeper into calendaring when it’s time to wind down and set your priorities for the following day.

Here’s what this configuration looks like on the charmingly old-fashioned Meridian watch face.

Now get customizing!

Remember: you can set up the complications and widgets shown above on the Apple Watch itself, but there’s plenty more you can customize from your iPhone by going to Fantastical > Settings > Apple Watch.

If you have a favorite Apple Watch setup with Fantastical, we’d love to hear about it!

You’ve just crossed over into… the end of time zones.

Okay — cut the spooky music. Today we’re talking time zones!

At Flexibits, we think a lot about how to perfect our users’ experience, and of course, we think a lot about calendars. It follows, then, that we spend quite a bit more time than your average office thinking about time zones.

Time zones feel like something of a necessary evil. In an era where people on opposite sides of the globe can connect easily and instantly, time zones can create a real headache when scheduling, coordinating, and… well, building awesome applications that have to account for time zones.

But how necessary are they, really? A straw poll of our team revealed that the majority of our employees agree with the statement: “I would happily get rid of time zones.”

“Time zones are evil.”

– Alex, Customer Support

Maybe time zones are evil! The question remains: are time zones necessary?

Since the dawn of civilization, people have been telling time by tracking the movement of the sun. Time as it relates to the position of the sun is called “solar time,” and technically, if every place were to observe their local solar time, they’d all be operating on slightly different time zones. Yikes.

In fact, before people had much of a reason or method to travel very far, there was essentially a different time zone in every decently-sized town — by 1883, there were over 144 local time zones observed in North America. In the U.S., a consolidation of time zones was initiated to keep trains running on time (and to keep them from crashing into each other). Not a bad reason to have time zones, and at least there aren’t 144 anymore.

It’s also important for our bodies to function at a rhythm that’s consistent with the movement of the sun. One way or another, we need systems that allow people to spend their waking hours working, learning, exercising, eating, socializing, etc. while the sun is out. The best system for our bodies is whatever keeps us closer to operating on our local solar time.

Lining up time zones with solar time is not trivial, and it can have wide-ranging effects on a society. Take Spain, for example, where the sun rises and sets about an hour later than the rest of the countries on CET (Central European Time), and puts them over two hours off of their local solar time. Researchers have found that this contributes to cultural norms of stretching work hours to 8PM or later, leaving Spaniards with much less free time and family time in the evening, and quite possibly contributing to the country’s abnormally high suicide rate and low fertility rate.

So… time zones are necessary? (And evil?)

We can all agree that we don’t want trains to crash and we like to be awake when the sun is out. But that doesn’t mean time zones should remain wholly untouched.

As it happens, the runner-up in our straw poll was not  “Leave the time zones alone, I like them,” but rather, “I don’t know, I have conflicted feelings.” (This is perhaps not that surprising when we consider the quotient of calendar nerds in our office — the more you understand a topic, the more complex and nuanced of a take you’ll probably have about a straw poll in the #random Slack channel.)

“I don’t think the problem is time zones as a concept as much as it is the worldwide implementation of them.”

– Jonathan, Engineering

Jonathan, you certainly have a point. While the core idea of time zones may be sensible enough, the actual implementation of time zones is often based on factors that are not optimized for ease of use or health of a populous, but rather economic drivers and even political allegiances. Spain’s inclusion in CET, for example, is actually a holdover from a decision made by Francisco Franco in 1940 to show solidarity with Nazi Germany.

Unsavory historical context notwithstanding, you just have to look at the time zone situation in countries like Australia or Nepal, where certain regions are 30 or 45 minutes off of the UTC hour mark, to start feeling a little confused about the global implementation of time zones.

“First let’s get rid of Daylight Savings Time. Then we’ll come for the zones.”

– Brian, Engineering

Ah yes, we could not talk about the iffy implementation of time zones around the globe without a solid rant about Daylight Savings Time!

Remember when we said that what’s best for our bodies is to operate as close as possible to our local solar time? Well, proponents of Daylight Savings Time disagree. The main idea behind Daylight Savings Time is to shift sunlight hours later in the day in summer months (originally to maximize daylight for farm laborers, but now just… for extra time to make it to the dog park after work?). Ultimately, even if you’re into the late night summer sun, it’s pretty indisputable that the biannual clock shift does create adverse health effects.

But we’re here to complain about time zones. What does DST have to do with that? Well, given the massive inconsistency of DST implementation across the globe, it creates another layer of chaos in the “What time is it?” cake. Not to pick on Australia, but…

“We haven’t seemed to have come up with anything better ”

– Kent, Engineering

Good call, Kent. So what are the alternatives?

The simplest answer is to just have everyone all over the globe on UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). James Gleick puts it nicely in the New York Times: “Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary.”

He admits that this system would take some “mental adjustment,” but if we learned anything from the Spain example above, it may not be so simple. Keeping odd hours can have an odd effect on the day-to-day lives of people, as evidenced by the implementation of a unified time zone in India and China.

Probably the most thoughtful and well-known alternative to time zones as we know them is the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar: a proposal for updating the entire system we use to track calendar years to make them more consistent and accurate, including ending time zones altogether.

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar doesn’t automatically solve the issues we’ve already discussed, but Steve Hanke suggests that the proper implementation of this calendar reform involves local areas having their own “work-zone time.” This allows local regions to stay in line with their solar time, while any coordination between distant locations can use UTC for simplicity. As for how local regions determine and implement these “work-zone times”…? Hey, the guy is busy trying to overturn the entire calendar, you can’t expect him to solve everything.

“Don’t worry, when we get more into space travel, we’ll drop time zones real quick.”

– Will, Engineering

What do you think? Are we ready for a world without time zones? Could we possibly shift to something better? Or should we just hurry up and get to Mars already?

Whatever happens, rest assured that we’ll keep making Fantastical as easy to use as possible, no matter what the future holds.

Contact management is a key component of your networking toolkit. Now that the era of the Rolodex is far behind us, what are the norms, tricks, and best practices for managing your professional contacts? Read on to find out!

Have your information at the ready

We’ve all been there: you’re having a great conversation with someone you know want to keep in touch with. You’re ready to exchange details, and… now what? Who puts whose number into whose phone? How will you know which “Taylor” this is when you try to look them up later? Should you connect on Facebook? LinkedIn? BeReal??

It’s 2023, and if you’re not using a digital business card, it’s time to up your game.

In Cardhop, your details are automatically housed in a digital business card that you can quickly share with new contacts. You can customize the information that’s shown, change the color of the card, add a photo or logo, and more to ensure you’re making exactly the right professional impression. This support article will tell you everything you need to know about configuring your digital business card in Cardhop.

Depending on how often you find yourself needing to share your digital business card, note that you can add your business card QR code as a widget on your home screen. (More information on how to do that can be found here.)

Do people still use physical business cards?

This varies a bit from industry to industry and place to place. If you’re a technologist at an AR/VR convention handing out physical business cards, you might get a few raised eyebrows — but in general, the physical business card hasn’t died out just yet.

For the most technologically forward but inclusive approach, try leading with the digital business card, but have a few physical cards on hand in case someone prefers to connect the old-school way.

If you receive a physical business card from someone else, note that you can quickly scan their information directly into Cardhop. When adding a new contact on iOS, Cardhop gives you the option to type details in directly, or scan them in from a card:

Related reading: Managing Business Cards with Cardhop

Track Groups, Relationships, and Details

When you make a new professional connection, you’ll want to keep track of their basic contact and work information, of course — but there are a few other useful thing you may want to track as well.

Group contacts by industry or other professional context

Beyond simply tracking someone’s workplace, you can create custom lists of contacts based on your own criteria. For instance, you could…

• House all of the new contacts you met at a VR technologies convention under one “VR Professionals” list
• Create a “Potential Leads” list after making connections at a trade show
• Group all of your contacts at different press outlets in a “Journalists” list

Click here to learn more about how to create lists in Cardhop. Note that Cardhop’s Smart Lists feature can also automatically group your contacts by company for you.

Track relationships within an organization

If you meet a group of people at the same organization, it can be very helpful to keep tabs on their organizational hierarchy (if you know what it is). That way, you can be sure you’re going to the right people with the right questions, and not chasing up an intern for an inroad they can’t provide.

In Cardhop, you can add relationships to your contacts, then see relational graphs at a glance:

You can also import information from an entire directory based in Google Workspace, Exchange, or Microsoft 365 to auto-fill these workplace relationships.

Information on adding relationships to your contacts can be found here, and you can learn how to import entire directories here.

Record the right details

Remembering useful details about a new contact can be a great way to stand out in future conversations — just make sure you’re not bringing up anything that’s overly personal or specific. There’s strategy to networking, but remember that the professional contacts you make are humans, too.

Jot down things like…

• Pronouns
• Specific areas of the industry that they’re really excited about
• Cool projects they’re working on
• High-level tidbits about family, pets, hobbies, etc.

But maybe don’t include…

• Notes on physical appearance
• Highly subjective thoughts on their work, company, or style
• Overly specific details about family or personal life

As a rule of thumb, if you think they’d be embarrassed or upset if they saw a certain note, don’t write it.

You can add notes to the bottom of your contact cards in Cardhop, and even include specific timestamps on your notes to make sure you’re aware of how recent your information is before referencing it in future conversations.

Following up with new contacts

After you’ve exchanged information and kept track of the right details, now comes the big question: when should you follow up?

This is also pretty variable based on context, but here are a few guidelines:

• If a specific timeframe was mentioned: If one of you referenced any specific kind of plan, e.g. “Let’s get coffee next week!”, set yourself a reminder to reach out within that timeframe to firm up plans.
• If you have a specific ask from them: Whether you’re hoping for an interview, trying to lock them down as a new client, or similar, follow up quickly (a matter of days) so that the details of your conversation are still fresh on their mind when they hear from you.
• If you don’t have a specific ask from them: For people with whom you just want to stay in touch, follow up in a more leisurely manner (a matter of weeks) for something casual. You could even look out for an event that matches their interests and invite them down the line.

What if they’re not answering?

If you’ve put a feeler out and haven’t heard back in a week or two, try them one more time, then leave them be. You never know what is going on in someone else’s life — maybe a family emergency or unforeseen issue is keeping them from answering, and the more you pester them with no response, the more you’re souring the relationship.

Following up with Cardhop and Fantastical

Cardhop’s quick actions integrate seamlessly with Fantastical so that it’s easy to follow up with your new contacts.

• Use the invite or Fantastical keywords in Cardhop to invite a contact to an event in Fantastical
• Use event or calendar to directly create a new event in Fantastical with a Cardhop action
• Use task, todo, or reminder to set a task in Fantastical relating to a contact (e.g. “reminder email Anna Burton 11/1”)

You can get a deep dive on quick Cardhop actions that integrate with Fantastical in this support article.

Related reading: Fantastical Actions in Cardhop

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Hopefully these tips will help you feel ready for anything at your next networking event! And if networking with Cardhop has you excited about all of great ways you can manage your contacts, head here for extra Cardhop tips and tricks.

What is natural language processing?

Broadly speaking, natural language processing (often abbreviated as NLP) is a set of tools and techniques for helping computers use and understand “natural” language; that is, language the way humans naturally use it.

NLP methods can be split into two fields: helping computers interpret natural language inputs, and allowing computers to generate natural language as an output.

NLP methodologies can also be categorized into dealing with text or speech, either as inputs or outputs. Here are some examples you’re probably familiar with:

• Automatic captioning services interpret spoken input from a video clip, then generate text output that matches what’s being said.
• Customer service chatbots interpret a customer’s text input (at least, they try to…), then generate text output to help them solve a problem.
• Voice assistants interpret your spoken input, then generate spoken output (sometimes along with text output) to answer your question or confirm that they’ve performed some task.

There’s an amazing amount of different techniques being developed to tackle each of these specific NLP applications in fields ranging from data science to computational linguistics to spectrographic analysis.

In particular, the problem of helping computers understand and use speech requires pretty sophisticated science, since the way humans talk varies widely from person to person and is hard for computers to replicate.

Computers are generally better equipped to deal with text, rather than speech — text is easier to turn into structured data because there are less factors like pronunciation, inflection, and emotions affecting how language is represented in text.

At Flexibits, we get to focus on doing the best possible job of getting a computer to understand your text-based input. We don’t need Fantastical or Cardhop to talk back to you (yet…?), we just want them to take the correct action based on what you type into the parser.

Even though we do have some shortcuts like task and /calendarname, our goal is to make sure you can use as natural language as possible when typing in your commands. There’s a reason it’s called “natural” language processing!

How do we teach computers to understand language?

We can teach a computer to understand natural language by building a language model that dictates how a computer should attempt to understand language inputs.

Rules-based models are, as you’d imagine, taught all of the rules of a language. Definitions of words, grammatical rules, conventions, and more can all be directly programmed into a language model.

• Pro: The programmers have a lot of control over how the model behaves.
• Con: Programming all of the rules of a language directly into a model can be an unwieldy, time-consuming task that doesn’t account for nuance.

Machine learning models are built by giving a model a ton of data, and then it learns (either with help from the programmers or completely on its own) how to understand language based on that data.

• Pro: A model that is well-trained on high-quality data will perform much more naturally than a rules-based model would.
• Con: Sometimes, programmers don’t actually know why machine learning models work well, which can make it difficult to tweak the performance of the model if they need to.

Given the enormous quantities of data that we generate on the internet every day, many language models in use today are what’s known as large language models (LLMs), where the “large” refers to the quantity of data used to train them. Most of the predictive language models you encounter on a daily basis are LLMs — like when a search bar tries to guess the rest of your query, or your phone tries to finish your text for you.

As for the natural language engine powering the Flexibits parser, we think it’s the best of both worlds: it’s a machine learning model with additional rules on top of it.

Our natural language engine does not do any predicting or contextual guessing like an LLM would. That’s because building an LLM with predictive capabilities often requires collecting a ton of data from your users, and as you probably know, we like to collect as little of your data as possible.

LLMs also rely on huge servers for their natural language processing tasks. By contrast, the Flexibits parser is able to run directly on your device, meaning any data you enter into Fantastical or Cardhop stays completely private — and it usually means our parser is able to work a little faster than an LLM, too. 

How does natural language processing work?

Here’s a very basic breakdown of natural language processing as it applies to our use case here at Flexibits.

Step 1: Processing the input

The text input is broken down into small chunks of data that a computer can understand.

This is where the computer starts to separate out which words contain key information (Drinks, Lila, Thurs), and which are referential clues (with, on, at).

Step 2: Analyzing the Input

Using its understanding of natural language, the model will now attempt to interpret the information contained in the input.

As you can see, a model’s understanding of grammar comes in handy here. The word “with” is a good indicator that the next input is a person; the word “at” typically will be followed by a time or a place.

Note that you wouldn’t need to type out all of “Thursday” or “PM” for the parser to know what you mean thanks to the flexibility of the natural language engine!

Step 3: Performing the Action

Now that the model understands the input, the program can do what it believes you are telling it to do.

When you use the parser in Fantastical and Cardhop, you can watch the action being teed up while you enter words in the parser, which is a helpful way to make sure you and the computer are on the same page.

More complicated examples

“Drinks with Lila on Thurs at 7P” is a pretty simple example, but the parser is able to understand more complex commands as well.

Is NLP a form of artificial intelligence?

Yes and no. The term “artificial intelligence” is hard to pin down in the first place, and natural language processing consists of a lot of different methods and applications, as we’ve seen.

Researchers often distinguish between two types of artificial intelligence.

• Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is what people usually picture when they think of AI in the sci-fi sense: a machine that is near-human in the way that it thinks, speaks, and behaves. This level of AI has not yet been achieved, but if it were to come to fruition, there’s no doubt that NLP would be a huge part of how an AGI could pass as “human-like.”
• Artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) is what’s actually powering most of the “artificial intelligence” we use every day — models that are built to be very proficient at a narrow range of tasks. AlphaGo may be incredibly good at playing Go, but that won’t help it cook a soufflé.

These are not hard and fast boundaries, of course. SmarterChild was a decent example of an ANI for text-based language in 2000, but ChatGPT, while technically also an ANI, has come leaps and bounds closer to being “generally” intelligent in that field.

On to the question on everyone’s mind — is the Flexibits parser a form of artificial intelligence?

Believe it or not, there’s debate on that question even within our own offices. Ultimately, the answer depends on how you define artificial intelligence. It’s pertinent to note that the definition of “artificial intelligence” has evolved alongside the technologies the term is meant to describe.

If you define artificial intelligence as a machine that is able to problem-solve completely on its own, then you’d fall in the “no, our parser is not artificial intelligence” camp. It simply does what you tell it to do when you type in your commands in the parser.

Or, you could take a broader definition of artificial intelligence: a machine that performs tasks that a human would typically perform. By this definition, you might say that we’ve been pioneering artificial intelligence since way back in 2010 — before it was cool.

However you define it, rest assured that the parser is smart enough and flexible enough to understand your natural language input, even when you type complex commands. So keep typing in your natural human way, let us know if you ever have trouble with the parser, and don’t worry about our natural language engine taking over the world anytime soon!

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.