In this post, we’ll explore some of the most common use cases we’ve seen since releasing Openings, and maybe you can find some inspiration on how you’ll use it next.

Ever need a vacation from planning your vacation? 

Are you dreaming of your next vacation? Vacations are enjoyable once you’re there and can enjoy the hard work put into them, however planning and leading up to the vacation can get very stressful. 

For me, the family dog has to be in good hands while we are away, otherwise I can’t fully enjoy myself. The easiest way to manage this that I have found is to send out my Openings link to our family members who have offered to take shifts staying with our dog or watching him at their home. 

Rather than have my volunteers figure out the schedule on their own, I send out an email with all the details they need to know, including the Openings link that lets them “reserve” the time that they will be watching our dog. This also allows me to look at my calendar while I’m on vacation and see who currently has our beloved animal. 

Not only does this make me feel more comfortable knowing who is taking care of our fur baby, I can also help manage the schedule if changes are needed, or someone is not able to help at all, and make arrangements based on the existing schedule. 

Help a friend in need with your Openings link

A friend from your local friend group broke his leg and is now in recovery mode, while still trying to take care of his family. You had a helpful idea of starting a meal train, to help with his recovery and take the pressure off of providing for the family, so that he can focus on getting better. 

Instead of starting an email or text thread, where everyone has to reply and then you have to coordinate each date that people sign up for, try sending out an Openings link with the info for people to book a time to deliver a meal to the family. You can fully customize your Openings link with a title and even a few pointers in the Description field so that people understand what will be requested of them when signing up, such as dietary restrictions or even where to leave the food on drop off. 

When the signup is complete and all of the entries are taken, you can then print off the schedule from a macOS device and give it to your friend so that they’re aware of when the meals will show up, and who each meal is coming from. 

Set your work day up for success

If you are in the photography business, you may be familiar with “mini shoots.” Mini shoots are a great way for customers to get a quick 15 or 30 minute photography session resulting in a handful of images. Photographers typically have a location set up with a backdrop and have multiple people sign up for sessions throughout an afternoon or a set period of a few hours. 

It’s not uncommon for people to book slots through a social media post, or even by leaving a comment in the comment section of a post. In some cases, the photographer can easily get overbooked based on demand or have to turn clients away if too many people are interested. Using an Openings link in the body of the announcement for the mini shoot will allow potential clients to see the available times, and the limited space, and book the appointment themselves. 

Also, make sure to use the Break time feature when creating your meeting template, as this will allow for a break before or after each meeting to account for the time it takes to switch between clients. 

Use Openings to add people to your team

Let’s stay in the business world for a bit, as one thing that will never change is the need for hiring new people as time goes on. Turnover in a company is inevitable and it can be complicated to bring on a new hire to your company. 

It can be difficult to find someone who takes the position seriously, and will give their all to a potential job offering. Sending candidates your Openings Scheduling link for them to book their interview time will force them to show initiative, rather than you having to offer a specific time that they may not reply to. This allows you to skip the questioning of who is committed to joining the company and gives the interviewees a chance to prove themselves prior to their first interview! 

When editing your meeting template, be sure to use our conference call integration, which will add your video conference to each meeting that is booked for you!

Learn more 

Since announcing Openings, we’ve loved hearing how all of you have integrated your Openings links into everyday scenarios, and we hope this post has inspired you with different ways to incorporate your links with this post. Reach out and let us know what you think if you try something new!

Check out our Support pages for more information on Openings, and as always, if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us on our website. 

We hope you have an awesome week ahead, and thanks for reading!

When I came across the section on printing in Cardhop, I swear I could feel something pop in my brain. Did you know that Cardhop can PRINT LABELS?

So, this year, instead of spending several evenings carefully copying and double-checking addresses, I’m just going to press command-P, put on my favorite Christmas movie, and pour myself a celebratory glass of eggnog.

What are your favorite unsung features of Cardhop and Fantastical? I can’t wait to learn (and share!) more mind-blowing productivity tricks!

Last but not least, happy holidays from all of us at Flexibits! However you celebrate, we wish you a wonderful and peaceful holiday season and a very happy (and productive ) new year.

Nowadays, it’s rare to go a day without hearing about or using video calls — this is what our new normal has become! Although the last couple of years presented new challenges in our day-to-day lives, Fantastical helps make things easier by simplifying the calls you have scheduled during your day.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how you can leverage Fantastical’s extensive video calling features to work for you. And by the time you finish this short article you’ll be a video call pro.

How call scheduling with Fantastical simplifies everyday life

I come from a big family, and each of us have complex schedules and long distances between us. At times, it seems almost impossible for us to all spend time together. However, since we started using Fantastical’s call scheduling features, we’ve grown closer as a family and look forward to our regular video gatherings. Fantastical has given us the ability to quickly make time for each other, and to fit regular video calls into our everyday lives!

Fantastical’s call scheduling features are useful in professional settings, too. Not only does call scheduling within Fantastical allows you to to create and join a call with your colleagues quickly, it also allows for seamless use throughout the work day. Prior to using Fantastical for all my video calls, every time I was about to join a meeting I recall having to hunt through my inbox for the specific email with the necessary Zoom meeting details. And with constant communication flowing through my work email, this specific message was often buried way down in my inbox! Thankfully, I no longer have to hunt through my inbox like this, as Fantastical simply shows me that I have an upcoming event with a call, and then gives me the option to join the call instantly. Super simple and hassle free!

Scheduling time for a call

Scheduling a call within Fantastical only takes a few brief steps. I first start by naming the event and then expanding the details for the event creation. This allows me to add my invitees and propose different times for our call.

With event proposals, you’re able to send out multiple options for the meeting’s date and time. Select Propose New Time to add and create a set of options for your invitees to choose from. I really enjoy this feature myself — in the past I’ve been invited to events with one specific time that I’m unable to make, and then feel guilty declining. By having multiple options presented initially, it allows invitees to provide input and accept an invite without double booking or overdoing their schedules.

Setting up your video calls directly from Fantastical

At this point, I can also select the video call service I want to use for the meeting. Directly adding a call to an event in Fantastical is currently compatible with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex (and for existing events that you’ve been invited to, Fantastical has the ability to detect calls from many more services).

From here, you can make many adjustments and customizations to video calls within the event details. For example, when setting up a Zoom call you can specify whether you want to enable join before host, mute invitees upon entry, or use a waiting room. This is helpful if you have large groups of people on your call, and can avoid participants from joining and then realizing they’re not muted after it’s too late!

You have lots of options here, such as customizing the meeting password and even deciding if you want to record the call. This can all be set up within Fantastical directly — give it a try! By scheduling and creating your call from Fantastical, there’s no need to leave the app to configure anything else, making setting up events with calls very easy to coordinate.

Last but not least, let’s discuss adding your invitees. Fantastical is super helpful here, because if you have a contact from your phone or directory, you can search and select the address instead of having to remember everyone’s individual email. You can even add an entire contact group in one go!

With the proposed invite and call finalized, an email will be sent to each invitee. Each person will then reply to let you know which times work best for them. Then, based on the answers from the meeting proposal, you can choose the time that fits best into everybody’s schedules. This is really useful, because Fantastical lets you see each person’s reply to the proposal, making it super easy to choose a finalized meeting time.

One of my favorite features of proposals in Fantastical is that all proposed times are visible when viewing your calendar. This way you can avoid double booking yourself while you’re waiting for responses to your proposal.

Once you receive the invitees’ responses to your proposal, you can pick which time you want to confirm. (Alternatively, you can even have Fantastical automatically schedule the event if your invitee replies are unanimous.) The event will then show on your Fantastical schedule as the sole event for your call, and your invitees will receive confirmation in their calendars.

Quickly joining a call from Fantastical

Not only does Fantastical allow you to schedule a call with ease, but joining a call is just as easy thanks to the one-click (or tap!) Join button. Visible in many different places, select the Join button and hop right into your call. My personal favorite way to use Join is directly from the notification menu (just tap and hold on the notification), as you can join the call without having to navigate through apps, widgets, or messages!

Other options include joining from inside the main Fantastical app, using the Join button within the event display on your device, the macOS Menu bar, or one of Fantastical’s many widgets.

Pro tips for call scheduling

Since I use call scheduling in Fantastical so often, I thought I’d share a couple of things that make life even easier for me. I hope they work out well for you too!

1. If you want your meeting proposal to be sent from a certain address each time (such as a work email address), be sure to change this by going to http://hub.flexibits.com.
2. If you forget to invite someone from your original invitation (or just don’t want to use email), Fantastical has the option to share a link containing your event details. This can be found at the bottom of the event details view while creating the event in Fantastical.

Learn more

Hopefully this blog post has given you an idea of how simple call scheduling can be with Fantastical. But, we’d also love to hear about the ways that you use call scheduling within Fantastical!

For additional information on how to use Fantastical’s calling features, feel free to check out our tutorial videos.

As always, if you have any questions of feedback, please reach out to our support team and we’ll be happy to help out and talk further.

That’s all for now. Looking forward to seeing you in the next post, where we’ll be discussing Cardhop’s business card scanning features. See you then!

Calendar Sets may be my absolute favorite feature of Fantastical and the Flexibits subscription. In short, Calendar Sets allow you to create different “views” for your calendar. This is incredibly useful for people like me who have both their work calendars and personal calendars in Fantastical, even though we don’t want to see all of them at the same time or in the same situations.

My use case is pretty common. I have my work calendars for my day job, which is a pretty substantial calendar with with events basically all day everyday during the week. Then I have my personal calendar, which is much lower volume, but has some weekend events and things like doctor’s appointments and family dinners during the week. I have Fantastical on my work Mac, my personal Mac, and of course on my iPhone and iPad as well, and I don’t want to see everything all the time.

Starting with my work Mac, I actually want to see basically everything here. My work calendars are essential, of course, but I also like to see some of my home calendar items because I need to know when I have a family dinner to get to and need to leave work at a specific time. Or maybe I need to take the dog to the vet at 10AM on Tuesday, and need to make sure I don’t schedule work things over that time frame.

I have a Calendar Set called “Work” that includes all of my work calendars, as well as one personal calendar that I know will have everything that could impact what time I should schedule things during my day job.

On my iPhone and iPad, I’ve got totally different needs. These are my personal devices, so I don’t really want to open Fantastical there and be bombarded with all of my work stuff. When I’m off the clock, I’m off the clock and I want to maintain a relatively healthy work-life-balance, after all! So on these devices I have a different Calendar Set configured to show only my personal calendars.

Pretty straightforward, right?

The extra power of Calendar Sets comes in the fact that these sets sync across all my devices, so while I may only have my personal calendars showing on my iPhone, I can very easily switch to my “work” Calendar Set momentarily to see what those calendars have going on, and then toggle right back to the “home” set that I usually use on my iPhone. In most other calendar apps this would mean going into my accounts settings, checking all the boxes next to my work calendars, unchecking the personal ones, and then going back to the calendar view. That’s way too much work and typically creates enough friction that many people will just have their work and personal calendars mixed on their personal devices because… who has the time to change them?

And what about people who have the same computer for personal and professional work? Fantastical has you covered here too, as you can configure different Calendar Sets to activate at specific times, or when you arrive at certain locations. So if you want your iPhone to show your work calendars when you’re in the office, but your personal calendars when you’re anywhere else, Fantastical can do this too!

All of this can be set up in the app preferences, and you can do it from any device that runs Fantastical, whether it be an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. These Calendar Sets sync across all your devices with your Flexibits subscription, and it’s truly amazing.

Sign up for a Flexibits account today and start using Calendar Sets to get control of your calendars like never before.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had more meetings in the past year than at any point in my life. The professional world got a crash course in remote working, and a major part of that is getting on video calls for everything. I looked it up recently and since going remote in March 2020, I’ve been on over 1,000 video calls for work. Some people will see that number and recoil in horror while others will be like, “No big deal,” but for me that feels like a substantial number.

Whenever there’s something I do that often, I desperately want to remove as much friction as possible so that I can get on with my work and not waste time, even if it’s a few seconds, fighting with my tools. It’s not a big deal to join a single video call — it’s likely opening your browser, loading a website, and clicking the next “join” button — but that adds up over time. Multiply that 5-10 second process by 1,000 and you end up spending several hours just getting into meetings.

Fantastical makes it incredibly simple to join your next meeting in basically no time, and it’s been a godsend for me over the past year. Whenever there is a video call attached to your calendar event, Fantastical detects it and lets you join the call with a single tap or click.

If you’re looking at the app, then any current or about-to-start meetings will have a “join” button on the event you can click to instantly jump into that call. This works on the Mac, as well as iPhones and iPads, and once you get used to it, every other calendar app feels archaic in comparison.

Fantastical is clever enough to capture basically anything you throw at it. Not only does Fantastical find video calls natively integrated into calendars (like a Google Meet on a Google Calendar event), it also checks the meeting notes and URLs to see if there is a link that takes you to an assortment of other apps. This all happens automatically, so you don’t need to tell other people in your company how to create meeting invites, Fantastical just makes it work for you.

And of course, Fantastical supports the biggest players in the virtual meeting space from the likes of Google, Zoom, Microsoft, and Webex, but also 20+ other services (full list here) that may not be as big, but if you use them then Fantastical has you covered.

This is the part where I could dive into a tutorial for how to set this up so that you get the most value out of Fantastical, but there’s nothing to configure. To steal a phrase: it just works. In a world where more and more productivity software is leaning into complexity and the need for users to build their own systems, it’s great to have a service like Fantastical that just works out of the box. Features like this are powerful, but they’re totally seamless and provide value immediately to every user, and I think that’s pretty cool.

The feature that has done the most to get me on board with using Cardhop has been the simple but convenient integrations between Cardhop and Fantastical. I love the way this works because it’s intuitive and isn’t too complicated to set up for yourself.

How Cardhop Works with Fantastical

The core integration between these two apps is the ability to instantly create meetings with exactly who you want to be invited to that meeting. So for example, if I need to schedule a meeting with my fellow product managers, I can hit my keyboard shortcut (control+option+D) to bring up Cardhop on my Mac, type out “invite product mgrs,” and then hit Enter. This will open up Fantastical with the correct invitees and then I can add all the meeting details in Fantastical.

How to Unlock this Power

So how did I get it so that I could invite all my fellow product managers to a meeting in once quick command in Cardhop? The simple solution is to create “groups” in Cardhop for the different groups of people in your life. I’m showing you one group today, but I actually have way more of these in my personal account. Groups like “Family” for my immediate family is one I use a ton, as is “Devs” for my dev team at work.

The dev team one is especially useful because I’ve got 8 people in that group, and not only is typing each of their names really time-consuming, it’s also error-prone as I’m almost assured to forget somebody.

Cardhop syncs with your contacts synced with Apple’s Contacts app, so you may already have groups set up which will already work with this feature. If you don’t have groups and want to set them up, then you can simply tap the plus icon next to the service you’d like to create it under (likely iCloud, Google, or Outlook), give it a name, and then start dragging people into it.

Depending on how many groups you set up, this can be as little as one minute of work that will save you tons of time and mental energy wondering, “Did I invite everyone I wanted?” over and over again.

Bringing it Home

The use of groups in Cardhop is really cool, but it’s also worth mentioning that this works with single contacts as well. Just type “invite James Smith” and that will create a meeting in Fantastical with James invited all on his own. The beauty of this system is that it scales from simple one-on-one chats to big team discussions.

If you’re a Flexibits subscriber and you use Fantastical for work, it’s worth checking out Cardhop to get these really slick meeting invite features. After all, it comes at no extra cost, so you’ve got nothing to lose.

If I’m being honest, I’ve never been particularly excited about the Contacts app on any of my Apple devices. For me, it’s just been a boring list where I can put people in my life so that I can talk to them elsewhere. I want their names, their emails, and their phone numbers so they auto-complete in iMessage or email apps. The Contacts app was a means to an end, so I never considered looking for something better; what would someone like me even get out of a better Contacts app?

But when Flexibits announced that Cardhop 2 was coming out and it would be a part of the Flexibits subscription I was already subscribed to, I figured I didn’t have anything to lose by at least trying it out. I knew people spoke highly of the original version of the app, but since I never cared much about this type of app, I didn’t use it myself and thought this was a good chance to see what all the hype was about. To my surprise, there were indeed a few features that I found useful on a regular basis and has me running the app all day on my work computer.

Natural Language Input

One of my favorite things about Fantastical is its natural language input for calendar events. It’s super simple to create an invite by just typing out something like “Sync up with John at Starbucks from 4-5PM” and have a one hour meeting set up at the right time, date, location, and with an invite sent to John. It feels like magic and is really powerful.

So I was very pleased to see that this natural language input is built into the core of Cardhop as well. Simply type into the always-visible text box in the app to find someone, add a new contact, or even invite people to a meeting in Fantastical. I can type “Jane Doe” to bring up Jane Doe’s contact card, or if she is not in my contacts yet, it will immediately start creating a new contact for her. From there I can either tap or click through the contact card to add fields, or I can just continue typing them into the text box and Cardhop will intelligently parse them into the right fields for me.

For example, I was able to paste the below information into the text field and Cardhop filled out the person’s name, full address, phone number, email, birthday, and website perfectly. That’s pretty darn magical.

Shanon D. Davis
405 Watson Lane
Fredericksburg, TX 78624
830-233-9346
ShanonDDavis@armyspy.com
February 2, 1981
theartofea.com

Invite People or Groups to Meetings in a Flash

Another thing Cardhop does really well is integrate into Fantastical, and it’s exactly the sort of integration you would expect from a contacts app and a calendar app created by the same company. From the text box in Cardhop, I can type “invite” and then give names or groups of people who I want to invite to a meeting.

So for example, I can type “invite Raymond” and hit Enter on my keyboard to switch over to Fantastical with a new calendar event created and with Raymond added already as a guest. I just fill out the rest of the meeting details in Fantastical and send it off.

And if there is a group of people I want to invite all at once, like, say, the other product managers on my team, I can type “invite product managers” and I’ll be sent over to Fantastical will all the people in my “Product Managers” group invited.

Once I discovered this feature, I immediately went through my work contacts and created a few groups for the people that I typically need to invite to things and it’s made this feature way more useful, in addition to making my contacts list more manageable all around.

Scanning Business Cards

This feature is not unique to Cardhop, but I think Cardhop does a really good job of scanning business cards or letterhead to add a new contact. Just tap the “plus” icon on your iPhone and the “scan business card” option will appear. This will open the camera, it will automatically detect when you’ve put a card in front of it, and then in a second or two it will parse the card info and get it into a new contact in Cardhop.

Again, this isn’t a unique feature, but I’ve tried it on a bunch of cards and a few letterhead examples I had around the office, and it works super reliably. I’m writing this in the summer of 2021, and iOS 15 is right around the corner with OCR features built right into the system, and I can only imagine that Cardhop will get even faster once it is able to add these new Apple SDKs.

Winning Over my Mother with Relationships

My mom is on my Flexibits subscription as well, and while she is retired and isn’t scheduling meetings all day, she loves one of the new Cardhop 2 features even more than me: relationships. In Cardhop 2 you are able to create relationships between people and the view their relationships with everyone else in your contacts lists.

She has a hobby of collecting family history information, and she’s been figuring out relationships and creating pen & paper family trees for decades. With Cardhop, she has been able to create relationships with the people she already had in her contacts such as “Matt is the son of Jane and Joe” and “Jane and Joe are married” and she’s managed to create an entire family tree in Cardhop.

Not only does this family info show up in each contact card, but from any contact she can tap “show relationships” to bring up a visual family tree that shows how everyone going back a few generations is related. It’s a pretty impressive use case, and while it’s not how I choose to use the app, it speaks to the flexibility of the feature.

Am I a Convert?

I’m certainly not spending all day in Cardhop, managing my contact list, but I do have it installed on all of my devices, and I get the most use out of it when I’m working on my Mac. I can use a keyboard shortcut to bring up Cardhop at any point and just start typing to see my contacts, to add a new contact, or to schedule a meeting with a few people.

If you’re already a Flexibits plan subscriber than you can get Cardhop 2 for no extra cost, it’s just a part of the subscription, so I highly recommend checking it out even if you’ve never seen the value in an app like this before. If nothing else, the Fantastical integration could make using Fantastical even better, so why not give it a shot?

Widgets were the hottest new addition to iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur last year, and with good reason! iOS users especially had been waiting years to do some sort of customization to their home screens, and we saw a ton of creativity unleashed as people figured out how to use this newfound power. Of course, Fantastical was there right from the start with not just support for widgets, but expansive support for widgets.

Fantastical has a stunning 14 different widgets you can place on your home screen or in the Today view. These range from decorative widgets that just show the current date, all the way up to large widgets that show the date, a calendar, your upcoming events, a shortcut to create new events, video call shortcuts, and even the current weather. And if neither of those sounds perfect to you, no problem, there are 12 other options in between!

Over the past year I’ve settled on a few widget configurations that I think work great and wanted to share them today.

Option 1: Mega Widget

The biggest widget Fantastical offers is a true powerhouse and it really feels like a mini version of the full app sitting on your Home Screen. I have this sitting on the third page of my home screen and it really has removed the need for me to ever launch the full app on my iPhone. I see my upcoming events, can join video calls in a single tap, and I can even create a new meeting in a heartbeat.

This is definitely aimed more at the hardcore calendar user, but if you fall into that camp then this is the best calendar widget I’ve seen.

Option 2: Small Widgets Used Together

While Fantastical has a bunch of widgets in many sizes, it’s possible you still won’t find one with exactly the combination of features you want. The second widget option I really like is having my next event shown in one small widget, and then another small widget that starts creating a new event for me in the app.

This is a bit more minimal than the above option, and would work really well for people who are constantly looking to what their next meeting is, and need to schedule things regularly.

But this isn’t the only combo — there are a bunch of small widgets that you can combine into whatever works for you. Maybe you want to see the next few events instead of just the next one, as well as a widget that adds a task or jumps into the in-app search; each of these work great as well.

If you want to get super clever with this, you can also go into each widget’s settings (tap-and-hold, then tap Edit Widget), and set up each widget to show specific Calendar Sets. For example, you could have one widget showing you the next few events at work, and then another widget right next to it showing your next events from your personal calendars. This is all an extension of the Calendar Sets feature that sync across all your devices, and can be set up in the Fantastical settings under Calendars. Don’t sleep on this incredibly useful and powerful feature.

Option 3: Literally Just What Day Is It?

Android has had widgets forever, and one thing people have always liked to do is put the current date and time on their home screen. The time is already at the top of your device, but Fantastical lets you put a widget on your home screen that simply tells you the date. There are a couple styles to choose from, but they look nice and give you that important little bit of information.

When I’m at work, I live in both my calendar and my task manager. My calendar tells me where I need to be and my task manager tells me what I need to do. This separation often works well, but sometimes it’s nice to see all the things you need to do in one place, and Fantastical makes this easy.

If you’re using Apple Reminders, Todoist, or your calendar service has tasks built in, then you can get everything into your calendar. Just go to the Fantastical settings on any device, go to Accounts, and then add whichever app or service you use. Reminders will be turned on immediately, and all other services will ask you to authenticate with your account credentials.

Once that’s done, you’re good to go; tasks with due dates will appear in your Fantastical app from now on. If a task has a due date, it will appear at the top of the day in Fantastical, kind of like an all-day calendar event. If it has a specific time it’s due, then it will appear on your calendar exactly when it’s due.

And if you’re using Calendar Sets to create different views in the app, your Reminders lists, Todoist projects, and any other list from a Google/Microsoft/etc. account can be added or removed from any Calendar Set. You have full control over what shows up where. Do you have one Calendar Set for work and another for home, but only want your tasks to show up when you’re at work? No problem, just add your tasks to the work Calendar Set and leave them off of your home one.

But Fantastical goes further than just showing your tasks — you can also create new ones and mark things complete straight from your calendar!

Each task on your calendar has a checkbox you can check to, you guessed it, mark that task complete. This of course syncs over to your task manager immediately. Alternatively, if you mark something complete in your task manager, then that item will disappear from Fantastical a few seconds later.

How do you add new tasks in Fantastical? The same way you add calendar events, of course! Just start typing out a new task and Fantastical will intelligently figure out when that task is due and what project to assign it to. And just like when creating calendar events, you can manually set priorities, due dates, and projects before you save it.

This may not appeal to everyone, especially people with large numbers of daily tasks, but I personally really like this feature because I have Fantastical open all day and it’s what I use as my primary tool to see what I should be working on at any given time. It’s a great feature and is something that helps me stay focused and productive at work.