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.
In my experience, Ical is very useful in organizing various calendar sources into one place, as well as real-time synchronization in the cloud. It is easy to integrate links, and media sources, as well as add attendees and make edits. A good example of a scenario is inviting everyone in various time zones to a meeting, and many attendees have their iCloud accounts, but some don’t. Everyone is able to be added to the meeting, showing in their correct time zone and seeing the necessary event details, as well as any virtual meeting, and invite details.
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
Google Calendar and Apple iCal offer basically the same thing. If you have Google devices, Google Calendar is going to work better for you. If you have Apple devices, Apple iCal will work better. Both have issues with cross platform support, however, Google Calendar on an Apple device at least works whereas Apple iCal on a Google device is difficult to setup and difficult to manage.
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
