Agenda 4 for iPhone improves on a great calendar app
Agenda from savvy apps is a super calendaring app, and Agenda 4 ($1.99) offers great improvements. In fact, savvy apps considers it a whole new app. There's certainly a lot of good stuff here, such as new views, impressive sharing options, UI changes and a lot more. Here's my look at Agenda 4 for iPhone.
New views
There's so much that's new with this app that I've got to just pick a place to start and jump right in. Agenda 4 offers two new views, for a total of five. My favorite, pictured above, lets you see the date, month and current appointments all at once. To use it, simply grab the bumpy "handle" on the right and slide it up. I think it's very handsome and useful. I don't have to squint to see the day's date on that tiny calendar, and every color-coded event is clearly legible. I've been using this view a lot.
The other new view is "event flyout." You'll find it by tapping any event. A detail screen "flies in" (get it?) from the right with all the pertinent info. From this one view, you can browse the details, edit the event, share it (more on that in a bit), jump to Maps or add some notes. Now, back to sharing.
Sharing
I can imagine Agenda's developers in an early brainstorming session for version 4, and someone says, "I know. We'll let people share the hell out of their events." Well mission accomplished. Let's start in event flyout view. From there you've got the option to share your event via text or email. Additionally, you can tap the share button to send the event to a variety of supported apps that you've got installed. For me, that's OmniFocus, Due and Drafts. Other options are Clear, Scratch, Things and ToDo. You can even determine the order with which those icons appear in the share sheet. See? I told you they went nuts with sharing.
Event creation
This is new, too, and it's another surprise. Actually, four surprises. Agenda 4 lets you change the style of the event creation screen. Choose from Agenda mini, Agenda, iOS and Fantastical. Yes, Fantastical. A third-party calendar app that references and works with another third-party calendar app.
Agenda mini is my preference. It offers the title plus start and stop time (hit the clock icon on the left to turn "all day" on or off). Agenda's expanded view I find confusing. It's comprehensive and lets you determine start and stop time, add alarms (one or two), set the location, add notes and invitees and repeat. Changing an event from timed to all day is done by clicking a clock icon which slides in from the left and eliminates one alarm option. There's a lot happening on this screen, and I'm not sure about the presentation.
The real cool trick is Fantastical integration. With this entry option selected, you get a clean compose field with a Fantastical icon in the corner. You can create your event using natural language ("Drive to PA tomorrow at 9:00 AM") and tap the when you're done. Agenda then launches Fantastical, creates the event and then takes you back to Agenda. Neat, but I'm not sure why you'd use one calendar app to update another. Maybe I'm missing something.
There are more little tweaks here and there and I'll let you find those. As I said, this is a new app and savvy apps is charging US$1.99 for it. Overall I like the app a lot and have to recommend it. It's fast, looks great and the external app support is super. Go get Agenda 4 here.
