The Apple iCloud Calendar (formerly iCal), is the calendar tool associated to Apple's productivity product suite.
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Clockwise
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Clockwise, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, is calendar optimization software, which uses AI to create uninterrupted blocks of time, enhance Slack, take the stress out of complex scheduling, resolve double bookings, and balance appointments while allowing users to meet their Focus Time goals.
June 16, 2020 Bain Capital Ventures announced leading an $18M Series B funding round in Clockwise.
Especially if they use apple devices, I would recommend this over other cloud based calendars for its tight integration with apple devices. You can generally add events by simply highlighting the relevant information and adding to the calendar. Or Apple mail will often automatically detect an event and give to the option to add it to your iCal with a single click of a button.
This is great for Operations people who need to parse through many calendars at once when scheduling meetings, even if the rest of the organization isn't using it. Clockwise does not allow you to put meetings on other people's calendars, though, or find times for meetings that you aren't in, so keep that in mind. It has still been a life-saver for me. Clockwise isn't great for scheduling client meetings due to the fact that it automatically places emojis in the names of the meetings, and there are other little branding things that are impossible to remove even on paid plans. I tended to just find time for the meetings in Clockwise and then move back to Google Calendar to schedule them
It allows me to set multiple reminders before a meeting
When I add an address it automatically links to Apple Maps so I can see where i am going and also how long it will take me. I can easiy click on the link and it will start navigation for me, pretty cool
I would love it to have more visualizations and not just the classic one in a common calendar and that it could be customized
You have the possibility to have a face-to-face call by sharing a link that, in my opinion, could be improved by creating groups of only contacts and limiting access to the meeting.
As I've said, Apple iCloud Calendar (iCal) does not work well when integrated with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook calendars. It's not very usable. Apple iCloud Calendar (iCal) does not stay in sync well at all with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook. You will waste a lot of time manually resyncing your calendars and you will never be able to fully trust Apple iCloud Calendar (iCal).
It doesn't have a dark mode, which is not fun. There is no Month or Year view which isn't great, only day or week. It's hard to get used to and the flexible meetings aren't as intuitive as they claim to be/should be. This is great for scheduling, but in terms of functioning as a calendar, it's not my go-to choice. The JOIN button for the upcoming virtual meeting is nice, though. Clockwise would have gotten a nine if I could schedule meetings on other people's calendars or remove my availability from the equation when scheduling meetings that I won't be in
For our Mac and IOS users, the use of the native iOS calendar and the cloud associated with it was an obvious choice for us, especially with the distribution of Apple products to our teams out in the field. For android users, it is easy to access the same services using the web-based client, and iCal allows various account types to be added to calendar invites. The iCal application allows the addition of 3rd party email and calendar accounts allow to be seamlessly integrated. All of the calendar accounts can be overlayed along with the native iCloud accounts. Google Calendar by comparison struggled to do all of these things as well, preferring their google Meet as the conference software and preferring Gmail accounts over all other types.
Clockwise has additional features/bells and whistles that the others do not. For example, the travel time feature if you are booking meetings that you need to drive to and from. Also booking across teams, rather than having to enter each individual manually
As mentioned previously iCal provides more info to me than just an appointment
i can add attachments like notes or links to other services inside the appointment and these will synchronise across my devices.
The search functionality in iCal allows me to save items in the notes and then find them at a later stage. An example - I save key information about meetings or activities and then when I am looking for it at a later stage i can jjst search iCal and find it without having to look for documents or through my notes.
There is no default video call setting (like Google has Meet as a default and Microsoft has Teams) this is a problem in that I can't schedule video calls so the work around is that I sync to a Gmail calender and then schedule the video call (Meet) in Google
