With a conversational way of adding new events, interactive widgets, and multiple calendar views, Fantastical is a superpowered calendar that saves you precious time.

What we love: How easy it is to fill out the calendar. Enter events as you would say them (“Dinner with Aaron at 8 pm”), and set up recurring plans with ease (“Date night the first Friday of every month”). Forward emails to your dedicated Fantastical address and the app will automatically extract and add the event or task details.

Quick tip: No more back-and-forth trying to find a free hour for all parties. Let others schedule appointments based on your selected calendar’s availability with the app’s Openings feature in the main menu.

Meet the creator: Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland founded Flexbits to make productivity more pleasant and fun. Their two apps, Fantastical and the contact manager Cardhop, are powered by a natural-language parser that turns plain language into actions.