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20 best iPhone apps to get you started

Here's a selection of some essential and not-so-essential apps that will help you get by in a world increasingly dependent on digital interaction. 

10. Fantastical

  • By Andrew Averill Contributor

Fantastical is that substitute for Apple Calendar you wanted, but balked at because of the $3.99 price tag. Take it from us, Fantastical is worth it.

Fantastical’s greatest feature is that the user can add events naturally. Instead of filling in a number of information fields, simply type out the event details (or use your voice if you’re on an iPhone 4S and up) and Fantastical does the rest.

“Friday evening work party at Olive Garden” – Fantastical fills out the date, guesses a 6 p.m. start time, location and description fields automatically.

The calendar display is more attractive than Apple’s, too. A swipe motion changes between week and month views. Little dots, in colors based on their respective calendars, mark the number of events that day.

Fantastical syncs with iCloud and Google calendars and can subscribe to others without much fuss. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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