Fantastical

Fantastical is essentially a Pro version of the Calendar app that comes pre-installed on Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro. It features a beautifully crafted user interface and a sophisticated natural language entry system that allows you to create appointments by typing or dictating phrases such as “lunch with John every Wednesday.”

The Mac and iPad versions of Fantastical are well integrated with OmniFocus. Specifically, you can drag an OmniFocus project, group or action into Fantastical, and an appointment will be created with a link to the item you dragged. When making the appointment, Fantastical will check to see if the OmniFocus item has an estimated duration defined. If it does, the appointment length will automatically match the estimated duration. This can be very convenient when blocking off time for specific projects and actions.

Tip: Although the OmniFocus drag-and-drop functionality is currently only available on the Mac and iPad, appointment links to OmniFocus projects, groups, and actions will also work on iPhones.

Fantastical Resources

Fantastical Video Field Guide – David Sparks (aka MacSparky) offers a free Fantastical Video Field Guide to help you get started with Fantastical and make good use of its extensive feature set.