Agenda is a beautiful alternative to the iPhone and iPad's built-in Calendar app by the great folks at App Savvy. In addition to performing the normal tasks you'd expect any good calendar app to do, Agenda also lets you confirm appointments via text message or email from directly within the app. Similarly, you can inform necessary parties if you're going to be late.
Agenda is universal app for the iPhone and iPad and is directly connected to your iPhone and iPad's built-in Calendar. This means if you add an event with Calendar, it will also show up in Agenda, and vice versa. This also means that if you're using iCloud to sync to your Mac's Calendar, everything will be synced up on there as well.
For this review, I will be alternating between iPad and iPhone screenshots. Both versions have the same functionality, just slightly different UI's.
There are 5 different views available in Agenda for the iPhone: yearly, semiannually, monthly, weekly (This is actually only about 4 days at a time displayed as a scrollable list. Rotating to landscape will display one full week at a time.), daily, and individual appointments. To switch views, you simply swipe left or right.
The iPad version does not have the yearly view (which I think should be eliminated from the iPhone as well, as it's not very interesting), and condenses the weekly and daily views into one screen. Each individual appointment on the iPad also doesn't get it's own screen, instead it's a little popup.
In Agenda, events are indicated by a colored dot -- the colors are the same colors you have chosen for your calendars in Calendar or iCloud.
To add an event, simply tap the plus sign. You can then add the event's name, select which calendar to add the event to by tapping the calendar icon, swipe through the month calendar to choose a date, enter in the start and end times of the event or mark as "All Day", add up to two alerts, indicate if it's a repeating event, add a location, select contacts to associate to the event, and add notes. If you select contacts, they will automatically be added to the notes field so that you tap their phone number to place a call. Addresses you add to the notes field also become tappable so that you can see the address in Google maps. This is true in both Agenda and Calendar.
However, one of the big advantages of Agenda is that if you added contacts, Agenda makes is very easy to contact them via text message or email from directly within the app. When viewing an event you'll see two big icons on the bottom, one for email and another for messaging. Tapping one will give you options to confirm, let your contacts know that you have arrived or are running late, or you can choose Other if you want to send a message for any other reason. When you make a selection, Agenda will automatically create an email or text message addressed to the associated contacts and a pre-created message. You can customize what these messages say in the app's settings.
One of the things that annoys me most about Apple's Calendar for iPhone and iPad is that I can't set a custom repeat for Tuesday and Thursday, for example. As an instructor, I have these types of repeated events I must regularly schedule, so I always had to use Calendar on my Mac to create these events. Not any more! With Agenda, I can add custom repeat options to my events.
In addition to Agenda's default theme, it also includes 11 other awesome themes and eight different alert sounds.
The good
- At a glance layout & twelve gorgeous themes
- Fast event creation w/custom repeat options
- “Go To” picker to fly to a date of choice
- Swipes & gestures to quickly change views
- Set the default view
- Set defaults for event duration & alerts
- Eight event alert sounds
- Tappable phone numbers, locations, etc.
- “Status taps” to send an email or SMS
- Copy event in the event view
- Share event via email in the event view
- Send events to Due
- Unique "Goal View" for tracking goals
- Add today’s date to the badge
The bad
- Swiping between views doesn't keep your "place". For example, if you scrolled down to the month of July in month view, then swiped to weekly view, you wouldn't be looking at a week in July if you were previously viewing a week in May. You have to tap on a week or day to set your place.
The bottom line
I never thought I'd be swayed away from Apple's built-in Calendar, but App Savvy has done it with Agenda. Beautiful app. Apple should be taking notes.
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