Last year, I reviewed Calvetica, a calendar app for the iPhone. It uses the same underlying data as the built-in Calendar app on the iPhone, so you can switch back and forth between the two. My favorite feature of Calvetica was that it made it easy to jump to another date, even a date several years in the past. Just swipe on the year and, in a few taps, you can answer the question of where you were on the night of such-and-such. Calvetica also reduced the number of taps necessary to create a calendar event. Just tap on a time slot on a daily calendar and start typing the event, far fewer taps than what is required to create an event using the iPhone's Calendar app.
The developers of Calvetica — Rob Foster and Adam Kirk of Mysterious Trousers, LLC — decided some time ago to develop an updated version of Calvetica that runs on the iPad and, in the process, they came up with a new version of the app that significantly changes how the app looks. This resulted in some negative feedback. As Rob and Adam explain on their company blog, they assumed that everyone would like the changes, but now they realize that this was a mistaken assumption, and thus they decided to re-release the old version of Calvetica as a free app for a limited time. The old version of the app is now called Notvetica, and while the developers don't plan to update the app in the future, it still works great on the iPhone. [UPDATE 8/15/11: The developers changed the name of the old version from Notvetica to Calvetica Classic, so I've updated the rest of this review accordingly.] For all of the reasons that I recommended that you get the app when it was $2.99, you should definitely get it now that it is free.
Additionally, you can now purchase the brand new version of Calvetica that works on both the iPad and the iPhone. On the iPad, I really like the app for the same reasons that I originally liked Calvetica — it is easy to jump to old dates and fast to create new events — plus I like the ability to see the events for an entire month at a time while you also see the details of a particular day. The iPad's built-in calendar app doesn't let you do both at the same time.
This is the point in a review where I like to show a picture of the screen to illustrate the point, but I realize that my current calendar is so full of confidential client and work product information that virtually the entire screen would need to be redacted if I showed it. So instead, I turned back the calendar to May 27, 1998 when I can see that I had a meeting at 11:00 to plan strategy for Y2K. Apparently, that one turned out okay, thanks in large part I'm sure to the planning I did. (You're welcome.) As you can see, the Calvetica for iPad screen shows you a full calendar on which you can see each of the items that you have for a day (although not the times), plus the right side shows you the events for a particular day. (Click this picture to see it full size.)
There are three different possible views for the right column. The Full Day view (show above) shows you each hour of the day. The Agenda view only shows you the hours on which you have activities during the day, useful if you have a really busy day. The Week view is like the Agenda day except that it shows all of the events (including their times) for the week. My favorite view on the iPad is the Full Day view because it is easy to see that times in the day when you don't have anything planned, and to create a new event you just tap on the hour when the event will start and a window pops up with the time part already filled in (assuming that the event will last an hour, although you can change that) so often all you need to do is type the event and then you are done:
If you want to jump to a different date, just tap on the top left where the month and year are displayed. A box pops up in which you can quickly select a month and year to jump right there:
The new version of Calvetica on the iPhone also displays a full month calendar at all times with bars and dots to represent events. This means that only the bottom portion of the screen is available to display the Full Day, Agenda or Week view. In the following two pictures, the first picture on the left is the new version of Calvetica. The second picture on the right shows the same day using the Notvetica app, the old version of Calvetica:
Which version is better? I guess that is a matter of personal preference. In the new version you can more easily tap on another day in the month to jump to the events of that day, whereas in the old version you had to tap the Back button first to choose a new day. Plus, the new version has more features, such as task management. And frankly you don't see that much less information in the new version; you can still see six hours instead of eight hours in the Full Day view, and I think that giving up two hours of space is worth it to see the whole calendar at the top. But fortunately, you don't really have to choose because even if you have the new version of Calvetica, for free you can get the old version, and nothing would stop you from switching between the two apps depending upon which one strikes your mood.
If you have never tried an alternative calendar for your iPhone, I strongly encourage you to spend the $2.99 on Calvetica. It will give you a lot more control over your calendar. Or if you are on the fence, at least get the free Notvetica app to decide whether an alternative calendar is something that you would ever use. Once you get used to Calvetica Classic, I suspect that you'll find yourself wanting the improvements in Calvetica.
Click here to get Calvetica ($2.99): 
Click here to get Calvetica Classic (free):
