Staccal Review

I get the feeling that the makers of Staccal had tried a few different calendar apps before and struggled to find one that offered a bit of everything. A bit of everything is precisely what Staccal offers with an impressive 11 types of calendar layouts. Other apps may be cheaper, look more stylish or offer more complex features, but Staccal does a fine job of keeping everyone happy at least some of the time.

With a gesture driven interface, Staccal does the right thing upon first loading: it provides a hands-on tutorial to users. It's simple enough to get to grips with but a helping hand is always welcome. Once that's completed, everything looks quite obvious to figure out and that's, mostly, because it is. That belies the options within Staccal, however. Users have the choice of viewing by month, week or day. Following that up comes a screen that offers a line up of the next few weeks, spanning across the upcoming month. A diary style interface is also viewable. Further options come from switching to a landscape appearance, over portrait style.

In each case, the layouts are straight forward enough, but it's the ability to switch so easily between them that makes Staccal stand out. Further simple yet effective features stem from the color coding that makes it easy to divide work, fun and personal errands making it obvious what's going on at a glance. Further compounding the simplicity, a variety of different countries and their holiday patterns are importable so there's no need to manually add public holidays.

Simplicity is the key behind Staccal. It does mostly everything but in a simple fashion. There's no way of syncing via numerous different sources, such as with Google Calendar, and there's no Universal support but what is there is great, even if it is rather expensive.