Fantastical is a brilliant new way of creating and searching events in your Calendar. It enables you to use “Natural Language” when creating events, and parses your entries for dates, locations and even people in your Address Book.
Although fully compatible with iCal, BusyCal, Outlook and Entourage, Fantastical works, even when your Calendar application isn’t running!
This week’s sponsored show takes you into some of the hidden features of Fantastical, a great application to help you manage your calendars. Fantastical runs independently of your main calendar application, but is fully compatible. Rather than having iCal, BusyCal, Outlook or Entourage running all the time, just a quick keyboard shortcut and Fantastical pops up, waiting to create your event.
Creating an event couldn’t be simpler.
Enter the details of your event in plain natural language - no complex syntax to learn. Fantastical parses your entry and extracts the date, location or even names of people in your Address Book, and populates the correct fields in your event automatically. Press Enter and it's done!
Fantastical synchronises your event with your chosen application.
Not sure of the date? Fantastical recognises entries like "next wednesday" or "the last tuesday in December", all automatically.
As well as automatic location entry and support for recurring events, creating events has never been easier. Fantastical also allows you to search through all your events quickly and effectively.
Now in version 1.1, Fantastical also supports editing and deleting events, directly from the Fantastical interface, as well as adding Notes.
This tutorial takes you through all these features and more.
| Chapter | Duration |
| Start | [45s] |
| Fantastical Introduction | [2m 19s] |
| Creating Events | [3m 7s] |
| Address Book Integration | [3m 37s] |
| Using Locations | [1m 49s] |
| Other Ways to Enter Events | [2m 19s] |
| Searching for Events | [1m 22s] |
| Keyboard Shortcuts | [1m 9s] |
| Fantastical Preferences | [3m 8s] |
| Launcher Integration | [3m 10s] |
| Wrap Up | [2m 2s] |
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Two short sections this week, as it's time for a mini montage!
In this week's tutorial, I take your through an application that can help you find your cursor on a large screen monitor, or help out in presentations by making your cursor more visible, and even allow you to display keystrokes on screen.
Along with a section on helping you upgrade to the latest version of MobileMe Calendar.
Another highly requested show this week, featuring BusyCal, the calendar application that iCal should be!
BusyCal adds the functionality missing in iCal but in a seamless and very clever way. BusyCal uses the same underlying technologies that iCal does, OSX Sync Services. So all you iCal data is immediately available in BusyCal, you can even bounce between the two when you're trying it out. In addition, because BusyCal uses OSX Sync Services, synchronisation with your iPhone or other Macs is handled automatically using MobileMe.
The new UI in BusyCal is very similar to iCal so there's a very easy learning curve, an BusyCal takes advantage of some additional features including core animation, support for rich text throughout, multiple alarms, configurable snooze periods, Stick notes, journal entries and many more features.
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