The interface itself is inspiring, featuring a different photo for each calendar day, based on any of nine themes. The slick design certainly makes a pleasant change from the dull styling of your average calendar app, while not detracting from the functionality.
The standard view shows the current week at the top with a large photo below. Just swipe right for the next week, or pull down to reveal the whole month. Events from linked calendars and Any.do aren’t actually readable on the calendar – their presence is indicated by a dot. It’s a shame that there’s no indication of which days are particularly busy. Instead, you need to tap a day to reveal its events below. Tapping a calendar event makes it full-screen with options to see/add attendees (with photos if available), location, notes and reminders (location and time-based), plus repeat and delete.
If you’ve linked Cal to your Facebook account, friends’ birthdays will also appear in the calendar – tapping one takes you to a fullscreen profi le photo of the friend, with an option to post to their wall while staying in-app. It’s slightly strange then that tapping an Any.do task takes you to that app instead – not that it’s a major problem.
Tighter integration with the Any.do app is supposedly one of the extra features added to the new Android version of Cal – it’s been around on iOS since last summer. Other bonuses include a landscape mode (sadly sans themed photos) and home screen widget – which makes it a lot easier to see what’s coming up without having to open the app.
Despite the Facebook and Any.do link-up, whether Cal is likely to help you to achieve a better work/life balance is debatable. Nor does it offer a lot more functionality than Google Calendar, say. However, it does it all so well and with such panache that it’s hard to resist.
