To throw all the changes to the calendar app in iOS 18. At first blush, it might actually look about the same, but let me show you what’s different. First, you’ll notice some subtle design differences here. Looking at the all day events, you’ll see that they have a slightly new design to them and a new iconography. You can see a birthday up here that looks a little bit different. Also for timed events, you’ll notice that rather than showing the entire address of wherever it is located, it now truncates it to just the name of the location, assuming it has one available. Overall, it just leads to a nicer look.
Another change is one that primarily appears when the calendar app is in a small all form factor, be it on an iPhone or in a side by side window on your iPad. So I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna take a secondary window and I’m gonna put that into splits screen and I’m going to shrink this window down a bit.
Now watch what happens when I go to the month view. Previously, the month view would only show a gray dot if there was some calendar event on that day. It was really just as a way to quickly jump between day views rather than a more informative view in itself.
Now you’ll notice that there are different color dots that stack up to show you what categories of events are available. This is neat and all, but it’s still of some limited use. But watch what happens when I zoom in a bit. You’ll see it’ll switch to a stacked view, which will show the different color stacked on top of each other for each calendar event. And I’ll show you the additional number of calendar events that are there, too, but it gets even more useful when you zoom in further because it starts to show previews of the events that are that day. And then you can even drag it out even further to show more of those calendar events. From here, you can also tap into the individual events and then tap back out if you need to. You can even pick up events and move them to other days and you can tap on the day number at the top to zoom into any given setup days.
Now those who are keen eyed might notice an additional change here and that’s these right here. We have an event at the top that’s all day and we have one at about five PM these are actually reminders and tasks from the reminders app, which now integrate with the calendar app. I will switch on over to my day view to get a better look at those, and I can tap on them to get a bit more information unless there’s an option to jump over to that entry in the reminders app itself, or I can go up to the edit option up here and edit it as though I were in the reminders app. And I have access to basically everything I do in the reminders app itself. You can, of course, also edit things, right? In the calendar view.
I have a reminder over here where it’s a bit of a conflict. I’m gonna pick it up and I’m just gonna move it to five PM. And of course, as you probably could have guessed, I can tap the little circle next to it to check it off and it will be checked off both in here and the reminders app and say I wanted to make another one. I can just start creating another event here. And you’ll notice that there is a toggle at the top to switch from event to reminder. And that will appear there as well. And of course, I can drag over the reminders app to show you that is appearing there as well.
Now, if I add another reminder here and select done, you’ll notice that it won’t actually appear anywhere over here. That’s because only scheduled reminders will actually appear in the Account Calendar app, which makes sense. Make it at eight PM and I’ll select done. And now when I scroll down on the calendar app, you’ll see that it is right there. And I’ve got a bit of a conflict. Of course, all these changes don’t just apply to the iPad, but also the iPhone as well and the Mac. There are a couple of bumbers with this, though. I just created a reminder called do dishes. And this is not a scheduled reminder. Before, you could drag reminders directly onto your calendar to create calendar events. And you can still do that. I will take do dishes here and I will drag it onto my calendar to create a calendar event. However, what I would like to happen here is I would like for that to just schedule my existing reminder and add it to the calendar as reminder. Instead, it does what it did previously, which tries to create a whole new event.
Now I can of course toggle on reminder over here and then select ad and it will add that to my calendar at that time. However, if I go back to my reminders app, unless that’s actually creating a whole new reminder in here that is scheduled for that time in addition to the one that I created it in the calendar from. This is, of course developer beta 1 though, so who knows that behavior might change before final release.
That toggle to create a reminder is not here. It would have been nice to be able to just create a quick shortcut that summons this and then give you the option to choose if you want to create a reminder or a calendar event instead. What I opted to do on my iPhone is I just created a shortcut on the lock screen that will ask you what you want to create. And then if I want to create a reminder, it’ll go through a different flow to create a reminder. So what do you guys think? If you guys weren’t using these stock calendar app before, do you think you’re gonna start using it more? Let me know down in the comments.