Today we’re releasing a beta (German and English only, French users must wait for next version) of QuickCal 3.1! This is available only outside of Mac App Store; beta link is here: http://quickcalapp.com/app/quickcal-3.1b1.zip . 

QuickCal 3.1 is focused around iCloud “Reminder Lists”. With Lion, Apple split calendars into two; one for events, and one for reminders. This caused QuickCal to be confused, as calendars which normally supported both now only supported one or the other. We’re now auto-detecting which calendars support what, and dynamically changing to the most appropriate calendar for the tasks that you’re attempting to do.

We’re also now adding Alarms to Reminders created in QuickCal that have due dates and times.

We also made huge improvements to the recognition engine. In the past, we’ve had a requirement that dates/times followed descriptions. We’ve now removed this requirement; the engine is now extremely flexible!

Changes:

• Now will auto-detect which calendars support reminders, and will switch calendars dynamically based on context
• Alarms will be created for Reminders which have due dates and/or times
• For reminder-only calendars, removed the need to add “todo” to text to flag as a reminder; just type the reminder title and you’re done.
• Parsing engine does not require event titles to be at the front of the entry text. “For 30m do something”, “Until 5pm Block my calendar”, “Tuesday at Rob’s House, Party 7-11p” all work now

German-Specific Changes:

• Support for many more terms which will indicate locations (Danke, Tom!)
• Date formats like ‘23.12.’ 

As always, beta software could and probably does have bugs. But we wanted to share some of this with you as we finish French localization efforts. So, if you’re adventurous, download away! 

If you are using the current version from the Mac AppStore you probably have to delete that first. (You can redownload it any time.)

And, we’d love feedback in our beta forums!