David Pogue Hates The Calendar App Microsoft Built Into Windows 8

Apparently the calendar application Microsoft built into Windows 8 is terrible.

So says David Pogue in a rant on NYT:

Listen, Microsoft: 1990 called. It wants its calendar back.

You can’t drag vertically through the Day-view column to create an appointment. You can’t drag an appointment to reschedule it. You can’t record an auto-repeating appointment like “Monday, Wednesday, Friday” or “first Tuesday of the month.”

And incredibly, you can’t create separate categories, like Home, Work and Social. There’s no way to color-code your appointments or hide certain categories.

This tidbit is part of a longer rant about how default calendar apps are pretty much terrible on every OS, including iOS and OS X.

It's true. They do all kinda suck.

There are replacements out there, though.

One I like a lot is Fantastical for Mac (and iPhone). What's good about it is how easy it is to set an appointment.

For example, I could just type (or, on the phone, say) "meet with jay at 130 friday at homes kitchen" and it'll set up the appointment all on its own, with an alert pre-programmed.

Reducing the friction in the process of adding appointments makes it a lot more likely that I'll add appointments, and this keeps my life more organized and less stressful.