David Smith‘s latest app, a calendar app named CalZones that is putting the focus on facilitating the handling of events across multiple timezones, is making quite a splash these days.
The app is mentioned and/or reviewed on many tech blogs and seems to receive universal praise, as far as I can see. And the praise is not unjustified. CalZones comes with some really fresh design and animation ideas, and – as mentioned before – the ability to take the friction out of handling multiple time zones in calendar events is certainly a compelling selling proposition.
The MacStories review mentions some „strategic“ shortcomings Federico identified during the beta period. My personal list of features that I would like to see added to CalZones is more about the practical aspects of working with a calendar app:
- It does not seem as if there is a touch gesture for navigating to the current date. However, when using a hardware keyboard, the app supports the shortcut ⌘ T for this purpose.
- No search. This is big, a calendar app that does not support search is not going to make it on my devices.
- I haven‘t found any way to create a calendar entry boundary with a finer granularity than 15 Minutes. For example, you can start an event at 9:15, but 9:12 is apparently not foreseen. Such a limitation, if confirmed, is not exactly compatible with calendar entries for train or flight connections1.
Despite all the complaints, I still think that Smith delivered a 1.0 that should be a solid basis for further iterations.
- At least for flight connections, I personally see a relevance for the ability to work with different timezones. ↩
