Lately I've realized how important my calendar is for me. And how badly Apple did screw up iCal. No offense, but iCal on the Mac is just nothing for me. I want my calendar to be always there when I need it, and to use as less space as possible. And I want the main things I do with my calendar, creating and editing of events, to be simple. This is where I came across Fantastical from Flexibits.

Overview

Fantastical is an Application that just sits in the status-bar (or menu-bar for that matter) on your mac. Once you click on it's icon you get an overview of the next upcoming events and a nice month-view. This is already one of the biggest advances of iCal. It's small, but super-effective.
On the top of that window you have two text-fields. One for creating events and one for searching. The search part is pretty self-explanatory but creating events is where it gets really awesome.

Fantastical understands you

One of the key features of Fantastical is, that you can write plain english sentences (or german, or french, or italian or spanish) to create events. Just write something like "Meeting with Joe tomorrow at 2pm at Cafeteria" and Fantastical will automatically create the meeting for you. It's that simple.
Even better than that, it not only creates the event, but it also has the ability to inform your partner, in this case Joe, about the meeting.

Synchronization

Now Fantastical is everything but a calendar management system. All the events you see in Fantastical and all the events you create with it are stored in your normal calendar application. Fantastical works with iCal, BusyCal, Entourage and Outlook and also syncs to iCloud (or MobileMe), Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar. I have set it up to sync with iCloud, so I have full access to my calendar everywhere through my iPhone.

Closing Words

Fantastical is one of those applications you don't no you need until you try them. So go and check it out, there's a free demo available. I really like the whole look and feel of the App, which is one of the most important things for me. In the week I tested Fantastical I really started loving the App, with all it's details, so you should really check it out.