I’ll admit it. I’m a keyboard junkie. I hate using my mouse. My trackpad is tolerable, but I just cannot stand using a mouse. I am so much faster using a keyboard than I am a mouse. One of the products that helps me accomplish this ludicrous speed on my Mac is Launchbar. This handy utility allows my fingers to fly all over my Mac, launching apps, navigating the filesystem, moving files, opening documents, making calculations, pasting things, doing Google searches, and a whole lot more. However, the one area in which Launchbar was unable to help me was making calendar events. Launchbar does have the ability to add events to a particular calendar, but it required a very specific syntax that I could never remember. While my calendaring app of choice, Busycal, is certainly better at this than iCal, creating events was always a very mouse-intensive process. I thought I was doomed to calendar-mousing-hell, until I discovered Fantastical.
Fantastical is a new menubar application that has been receiving a lot of press lately in the Mac community. It is an app that displays the current day and day of the week in the menubar. If you click it, you see the current month, and any upcoming calendar events, color coded with their respective calendars. It allows you to view other months, and other events. While these features are nice, it is what appears at the top of the window that is so amazing. There is a text box that allows you to create new calendar events in natural language. This is incredible. I can type something like
Have lunch with Steve at 7PM next Tuesday at Betelnut
and Fantastical will decipher this into a calendar appointment, filling in all the important fields, allowing you to edit, then save the event. This is incredible in and of itself. You can configure a keyboard shortcut to activate Fantastical from any application, and you can immediately begin typing to create a new event.
However, I have a dream. My dream is to have Launchbar be the window to my Mac world. I want to be able to do just about anything from Launchbar. Already, I am well on my way to this. I can use it to move files, launch any app, open any file or folder, do calculations, add OmniFocus tasks, browse to a URL, do a Google search, and a wide variety of other cool things. And now, with the new version of Launchbar, I can create calendar appointments, too. Launchbar 5.1 allows the use of 3rd Party calendaring utilities. Now, when I select one of my calendars in Launchbar and invoke it, I can type in natural language into Launchbar, then when I hit return, Launchbar will pass the input to Fantastical, which parses what I typed, just as if I typed it into Fantastical itself! While this may not seem like a big deal, I think this is huge, because it is establishing Launchbar as the central access of my Mac life, and I can do just about anything thru it. I don’t need to remember a bunch of different shortcuts for all my different apps and utilities; I don’t even need to open them half the time! Launchbar just runs my entire Mac, and I think this is amazing.
If you want to get in on this awesomeness, you can get Fantastical at the Mac App Store for $20 USD, and Launchbar for $35 USD.
This post originally appeared at Blog.ConnorP.com.
