One of the most-used application on my iPhone is my calendar. For quite some time, Sunrise has been my go-to app. About a year ago, Sunrise was purchased by Microsoft. This week, Microsoft has decided to kill the app. With the announcement that Sunrise will be inactivated in August, I started a search for an iOS calendar replacement. Although Sunrise appears to now be baked into Outlook for iOS, my workplace doesn’t allow me to use the app to access my Outlook account. I’m going to sorely miss Sunrise’s integration with LinkedIn and especially, the Sunrise Meet feature, that I use frequently.I am trying two calendars as replacements: Cal by Any.do and Fantastical 2. Neither seems perfect, but I’m leaning toward Cal for its clean design. I’ve never been fond of Fantastical’s user interface and I’m always a sucker for good design.I’ll keep you posted on what I find. If you have a particular go-to calendar app, I’d love to hear what you use, and why you like it.

I continue the search for the perfect calendaring app on my iPhone. I wrote a few months ago about Tempo, from the makers of Siri. Although I used Tempo for several months, another contender, Mynd reached my radar screen.

I don’t find the Mynd interface (or colors) aesthetically pleasing, but the app has so many cool features it’s worth a look. Mynd connects to your calendars locally and then mines data for each appointment.

When I first opened the app, I noticed the Mynd View. This view includes the time of my next appointment, the current weather conditions, the people I’ll meet with that day, the locations of my meetings, and the total number of events for the day. I can click on any of these boxes to drill down further. I can connect Mynd to Evernote (appending relevant notes to each meeting) and to LinkedIn (appending further information to each meeting attendee).

Mynd is also location aware. It estimates how long it will take to drive to my next meeting and tells me when to leave my current location. If I’m running late, I can text, email, or call any one (or all) of the meeting attendees from within the app.

In addition, Mynd has a new feature called the Scheduler, that facilitates scheduling of meetings. The Scheduler scans my calendar and suggests free times that might work for a proposed meeting. Mynd aggregates all the potential times I choose and formats an email to my prospective meeting attendees.

Although I’m a big fan of Mynd, I still find making calendar entries clunky. For this, I often turn to Fantastical2. Fantastical is able to make appointments from english sentences (e.g. Meet with Sir Ken Robinson at Weaver Street Market in Durham, NC for lunch tomorrow at noon). I’ll often type (or dictate) my appointment details into Fantastical2. The dictated appointment is instantly translated into a calendar entry that quickly becomes available in Mynd.

Oh…and Mynd is free. Get Mynd in the App Store

Addendum: a reader asked if I was truly meeting with Sir Ken Robinson. Sadly, the answer is no. I admire the hell out of the man and do hope that someday.....

Addendum 2: Although I was very high on Mynd at one point, I’ve gone back to Tempo. Many of the features that were free in the original version of Mynd, are now premium (paid) add-ons. In the end, the change in feature set and the ugly interface scared me off. Life is too short to live with an ugly interface (especially on a frequently used calendaring app)!