Tempus is a new calendar app from the developers at Mysterious Trousers (makers of Calvetica). Unlike the feature-filled Calvetica 4.0, however, Tempus has been designed with a newer codebase and a far more focused feature set in mind. This is probably the most trimmed down scheduling app you can currently find on the App Store, and it should feel like a breath of fresh air for users who feel overwhelmed by their calendars.
The majority of the navigation in Tempus is accomplished with taps and gestures: tap and hold on a day to create an event, swipe left from September to see August, and so on. Most of these gestures and taps are fairly intuitive, but new users would fare a lot better if they could see a quick video demo or tutorial upon first launching the app. In this way, Tempus is probably just a little too simple.
Month, List, Week
There are three main views in Tempus: month, list, and week.
Month view is designed to provide a quick overview of your schedule, and so the only things you’ll find on it are dates and coloured dots (which represent events on different calendars). To see more detail, you simply tap on a given date to bring yourself to the list view.
List view should be quite familiar to users of Calvetica or the default Calendar app: it’s a scrollable list of all upcoming events, sorted by date. A quick tap on the plus symbol next Events only show their starting times in this list, so you’ll have to tap on an event to see its details, or switch to week view to see an end time.
Week view is the only view available in landscape mode on the iPhone (there’s an on-screen toggle on the iPad), and it’s the most detailed view within Tempus. Switching to week view will show six days at a time, with colour-coded blocks representing various events. As a nice touch, tapping and holding on a particular hour on the iPhone’s week view will bring up a dialogue to make sure you have the right starting time (e.g. tap-and-hold on 2 AM and you’ll see a dialogue to create an event starting at 1, 2, or 3 AM).
Calvetica Light (Very Light)
There was a little bit of controversy that accompanied the release of Tempus a few days ago, wherein Mysterious Trousers was accused of copying another iPhone calendar app (Agenda by Ken Yarmosh) while designing Tempus. I actually rather like both Agenda and Tempus, but I don’t agree that there’s enough of a similarity between the two apps to accuse anybody of copying here. Both apps feature week, list, and month views (what calendar app doesn’t?), but Agenda goes into far more detail, and has a larger and more straightforward interface.
If anything, Tempus simply feels like a much, much lighter version of Calvetica, since Tempus’ “New Event” dialogue and Week View were clearly taken right out of Mysterious Trousers’ older calendar app. The icon could use a bit of work, though, as it’s currently so minimal that it approaches generic.
Conclusion
If you’ve been looking for a lightweight calendar app with two-tap event creation and a sparse visual style, give Tempus a try. It’s $2.99 for the whole package, which runs on both the iPhone and iPad, and it could well become your new favourite pocket calendar.
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Tempus was purchased by the author for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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