Ditch your iPhone Calendar for Something Better

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I'm here to tell you there's a much better calendar app to use than the one that comes with it.

In fact, Calvetica puts the default calendar to shame with its elegance, common-sense navigation and ease of use.

The first thing you notice about Calvetica is that aesthetically it's light-years ahead of other calendar apps. Not clumsy like the app Steve gives you, yet not too dressy.

And the developers have a sense of humour. Its four original themes - including "romantic grey" and "knife fight pink" - have been trimmed back to two offerings, red and black.

In month view, there are dots in the days with entries. But each dot represents an different entry, unlike a single dot representing a day's worth of events as in the native iPhone app.

You can switch between the full day, just your working day, or a very handy collapsed view of your entries for a particular day.

In all of the day views, the current one is always highlighted in red. The others are grey. There's never any confusion about whether you're in "today" or not.

But what I like most of all about Calvetica is that you can enter a new event right in the hour slot for that day - and set the time to five minute increments - without having to flip a single ugly tumbler up or down. This simple feature is worth the $2.99 the developers are asking.

But there is a lot more. You are not limited to two alerts per event - add as many as you want with the common-sense interface. If you flip your orientation sideways, you'll even get a great overview of your week, or the week of the day you've been viewing depending on your settings.

In fact, there are loads of settings to customize. And Calvetica will sync with MobileMe, Google Calendars, and you guessed it, Steve's app. Don't get any ideas about syncing to more than one, though. Apple doesn't want anyone by-passing MobileMe to keep their iDevices in harmony.

I've lived with Calvetica for two-weeks now and have turned the page on the standard-issue calendar. My advice? Pay the three bucks for Calvetica, play with it, work in it. It won't be long before you'll fire your default calendar, too.


Pics above were done on the iPad so I wouldn't mess up my real entries for today. Borders are not as heavy on the iPhone.