Today marks the release of version 2.0 of Flexibits’ amazing iOS calendar app Fantastical. Fantastical 2.0 is not an absolute redesign. It keeps the app fundamentally the same, but definitely moves it away from the older iOS 6 style UI by flattening out the title bar and brightening up the colors. There is a new Light Theme as well, which I love. The main view is almost unchanged from the original version, but the Day Ticker now smartly starts at the first block, displaying four more days ahead of it instead of wasting space being in the center and leaving two days behind. Pulling down on the Day Ticker still reveals the full month calendar, which is unchanged. The Fantastical icon was made a little bit better than the old one by brightening up the colors and removing the ugly brownish calendar squares, but they still did not remove the simulated page curl in the bottom corner, which I continue to dislike. Admittedly though, I’m extremely picky about app icons, so you may find it perfectly acceptable.

The most notable addition to the new Fantastical is support for Reminders. Your reminders and calendar events are now all laid out together in the main view. I love anything that increases my day to day efficiency, and this new integration allows me to no longer need to open an extra app dedicated to reminders. Furthermore, Fantastical now supports adding reminders through its incredible natural language parsing engine, meaning I no longer need to deal with the terrible date picker in the Reminders app to set up a reminder for a specific day.

Over at The Axx, I’ve created two actions to speed up the process of adding events or reminders to Fantastical by using Drafts or Launch Center Pro. I’m particularly looking forward to now being able to type out a list of reminders, since I often add more than one at a time, and parse each of them, one by one, through Fantastical automatically. This has always been useful for adding events as well, but I find myself adding multiple reminders far more often than I add multiple events. You can get the Parse In Fantastical action, the one for parsing events, here, and the Parse Reminders In Fantastical action here. Keep in mind that parsing multiple events or reminders starting from Launch Center Pro will require a Pythonista script to break them up and format them correctly for Drafts to run the necessary actions (the script is available at the same link as well). If you start in Drafts, no script is needed.

Fantastical is a great update to my favorite event (and now reminder) parser. I still prefer Logacal for actually viewing my upcoming events, but I never add a single calendar event except through Fantastical, as no other app comes remotely close to besting the ease and accuracy of Fantastical parsing. You can get Fantastical 2 on the App Store for $2.99.