Anyone who is driven by a schedule knows how important it is to have a good calendar.
For me, having a good calendar that would cross platforms and work seamlessly with my work and personal calendar was necessary. Having it work on my desktop, iPad, and iPhone all together – so I could update one and they all update – was critical.
A few months ago, my superintendent suggested I try Calendars by Readdle. I liked it enough to buy it for $4.99 and never regretted it…But it wasn’t absolutely perfect. It didn’t have my tasks or to-do list in there. It wasn’t as neatly organized as I wanted with coordinating my calendars…But it was far better than the generic iPad calendar app. I really liked it. That is until I found…
an opportunity to beta test the new Calendars 5 app by Readdle. Same company, same general concept, but far superior app.
This app includes: tasks (to-dos), color coding, a nice clean layout with EVERYTHING at my fingertips. In the “day” view, I can see the details of my meetings, not just the meetings (I LOVE LOVE LOVE this feature!). Everything is seamlessly integrated with Google Calendar and the IOS calendar.
Another feature that I absolutely love is the ability to schedule recurrent events. So for those of you that have monthly meetings easy to schedule! Or you have a meeting twice a week – once at 3:00 and once at 7:00…NOT a problem.
The settings are easy to understand and fairly easy to customize. There are slightly different views based on iPad vs iPhone; however, the app performs similarly. The major difference that I’ve found so far is that on the iPhone you pull down on the page to get a menu bar and it’s always present on the iPad.
Don’t wake my word for it…Watch this one minute video. It will answer all your questions.
Now, of course there is one thing I don’t like (there almost has to be, right?). One of the things I love about the Gmail app is that I’m able to have multiple Gmail accounts and switch between them. Unfortunately, this app does not allow you to have multiple Google calendars and switch between them.
Fortunately, since it is very important for me to have my personal calendars AND my work calendar synced, I was able to work around this by “sharing” my personal google calendar with my work calendar. It’s not always elegant – some things show up twice for some reason (but it does that on my desktop Google calendar too – it’s not a fault of the app).
While at first, I was annoyed with this…I began to realize that really…it’s kind of a blessing. I don’t have to worry that I’ve missed something in one calendar or another when scheduling meetings. Everything is in one place. It’s not always elegant…but I’d rather be told about something twice than to potentially miss an important meeting because I’ve double booked myself.
With an introductory price point of only $4.99, I give this app a firm 4.5 out of 5 stars. It’s well worth the money.
So… Have you purchased the app? Will you purchase it? .I can’t wait to hear what you think
Until then…Adventure on!
Mary
Speech Adventures 
Nice post- Calendars+ has been my go-to app also and I am eager to upgrade to the new one. Thanks for the tip on sharing calendars between accounts- I have been able to do the tasks feature in the original app though- it’s up the top (list/day/week/month/tasks), but only on iPhone! So that was weird.
I never tried it on the phone….but I have now. Love it!
I got Calendars 5- very nice- I am also happy that this is a universal download. I am pretty sure I needed to pay for C+ as separate apps for iPad and iPhone
I’m going to be the ol’ fuddy-duddy dinosaur here and plug paper calendars! I have paper planners – one just for meetings (because I have so many – I have 90 kids on my caseload) and one for testing dates and tracking Medicaid. What I love about paper is that I can grab it, open it and the whole month is right there, big enough to read all at once. I don’t have to worry about it “crashing” or being unable to access it because my device ran out of power. I color-code the different meetings with highlighters so I can see at a glance when the “biggies” are coming up. It also makes it easy to go back and look for a meeting date, or when counting up evaluations and such. There’s enough room that I can add personal events in there so I’ll remember to leave on time (or less so, early). They’re thin, lightweight, and cheap (free from the school). I have yet to find a good enough reason to go electronic for this task. Having all your calendars in one place sounds like a good idea, but I really don’t need that feature to justify spending hundreds of dollars (I don’t own a smartphone). I do have a school-owned iPad, but again, I find it unwieldy for accessing what I want quickly and typing info in is laborious – much quicker to pen it in. Am I the only one left out here that hasn’t gotten on the smartphone calendar bandwagon?!? 🙂
LOL you might be Pam! I could never remember my paper calendar, I quit using it midway through the year. The electronic version works much better for me.
Got it too. I had Calendars+ already. I’m liking this new one so far. I’ve been wanting something to integrate my tasks onto my calendar. I haven’t used a paper calendar in years! Thanks for your recommendation!