What to expect from hora's public beta — TestFlight opens Friday

Friday morning, the first public beta of hora Calendar ships. Version 0.6.0, straight to TestFlight, and a Discord opens alongside it so feedback, bug reports and "wait, is this meant to do that?" questions can happen in one place.

I've been heads-down on this for six weeks. Friday is the first time the app goes somewhere other than my own Mac. If you're on the waitlist, you're in.

This is the post I'd want to read before installing a v0.6 of anything: what the beta actually is, what's in it right now, what's already queued for 0.7.0, and how I'd love you to test it.

hora, in two sentences

hora is a native macOS Google Calendar app. Swift and SwiftUI, single binary, no Electron, no web wrapper, no background polling loop burning your battery.

It exists because I couldn't find a good native Google Calendar client for Mac. Fantastical feels bloated. Notion Calendar is Electron. Apple Calendar doesn't really know what to do with Google accounts. So I built my own take — and now you get to shape it.

At a glance: 0.6.0 vs 0.7.0

Area	In 0.6.0 (this Friday)	Coming in 0.7.0
Event CRUD	Full, optimistic, synced to Google	—
Recurring events	RRULE + UNTIL/COUNT, "this & following"	—
Views	Day / Week / Month	—
Menu-bar extra	Next-meeting countdown, one-click join	—
Multi-account	Personal + work side by side	—
Video-link detection	Meet / Zoom / Teams auto-join button	—
Desktop widget	WidgetKit, deep-links into the app	—
Real-time sync	APNs silent push, ~1s end-to-end	—
In-app calendar CRUD	—	Create / delete / (un)subscribe
Google preferences	—	Week start, timezone, 12/24h, hide-declined
Apple Intelligence	—	Quick Event Add, focus-time planning, availability messages

What's shipped in 0.6.0

This is what you'll actually get when you install the beta on Friday:

• Full event CRUD, synced directly with Google Calendar. Create, edit, delete, drag, resize — every mutation round-trips to Google with optimistic UI, so you never watch a spinner.
• Recurring events with proper end dates. UNTIL and COUNT pickers, "this and following" deletes, correct RRULE handling. No more infinite series by accident.
• Day, Week, and Month views.
• Keyboard-driven navigation, arrow keys between days, T for today, C for new event.
• Menu-bar extra with your next meeting. A glanceable "next in 17m" countdown, one-click join for the video link. Deep-links land on the right event inside the app — not just the right day.
• Multi-account support. Personal and work side by side, no "which account does this event belong to?" confusion.
• Auto-detected Meet / Zoom / Teams links. hora sniffs the event description, pulls the join URL out, and gives you a dedicated join button.
• Desktop widget (WidgetKit). Your next few events on the desktop, tappable, deep-linking straight into the app.
• Real-time Google Calendar sync. Changes from the web, your phone, or a colleague's client show up on your Mac in roughly a second — not five minutes from now. Full write-up here.
• Availability sharing. Cmd+Shift+A, picks free slots out of your actual schedule, copies to clipboard. No server, no intermediary — your data only ever touches Google.

Nine languages supported: English, Polish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese. (More on the translation story further down — I need help.)

What's coming in 0.7.0

Already in flight, shipping in the next update cycle:

• In-app calendar CRUD. Create, delete, subscribe to, and unsubscribe from calendars without leaving hora — currently those flows still bounce you to the Google Calendar web UI.
• Respect your Google Calendar preferences. First day of the week, timezone, 12/24-hour format, hide-declined — hora will read settings.list from your Google account and match your existing preferences on first launch instead of asking you to set them twice.
• Apple Intelligence — Quick Event Add. Natural-language event creation — type "coffee with Anna tomorrow at 3" and hora drafts the event for you. Runs on your Mac, your text never leaves the device.
• Focus Time Planning. hora looks at your week's meeting map and suggests where your protected deep-work blocks should go — before your calendar fills up for you.
• Availability Sharing with Apple Intelligence. The Cmd+Shift+A flow already picks free slots out of your schedule. In 0.7.0, Apple Intelligence writes the message around them — a natural, context-aware "here's when I'm free" paragraph you can paste straight into an email with no editing.

What's still rough — please file bugs

Being honest about the current edges so you know what you're walking into:

• Drag-to-resize works, but the snapping feels jumpy at certain zoom levels.
• Very large calendars. Accounts with 10k+ events sync correctly, but first-paint after login is slower than I want. A performance pass is next.
• Non-English copy. Most of the translations are machine-generated. They're functional but not idiomatic — which is why I'm asking for help below.

If you hit anything else, Discord is the fastest path. hello@horacal.app works too and goes straight to me.

How to join

If you're on the waitlist, you'll get the TestFlight link and the Discord invite on Friday morning. One-tap install, no paywall during beta.

Not on the waitlist yet? Sign up at horacal.app before Friday and you're in the same batch.

Bring a friend

After Friday, we're opening a second batch — another 200 testers. If hora clicks for you, send your Mac-using, Google-Calendar-complaining friends to horacal.app/testflight — that's the direct invite URL for the next wave. Word of mouth from someone who already uses the app beats anything I can write.

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later
• A Google account
• Mac-native only — no iPhone or iPad build. (See the native vs Electron/PWA post for why that trade-off exists and why I'm not in a hurry to break it.)

What I'd like you to test

Use hora the way you actually live in a calendar. That's the only test that matters. But if you want priorities, here's what I'm paying most attention to:

1. Predictable behavior — CRUD, recurring edits, multi-account. When you do X, does Y happen, consistently? Does the state after a sync match what you'd see on the web UI?
2. UI feel — responsiveness, polish, menu bar, widget. Does every interaction feel instant? If anything ever feels like it's thinking, flag it.
3. Speed — scrolling between weeks, opening the popover, dragging an event, hitting a shortcut. A calendar is something you touch fifty times a day; it has to be quick.
4. Real use over a full day. Don't test it like QA. Use it as your only calendar. Tell me the moment it makes you reach for Chrome.
5. Menu-bar countdown, for a full day. The live "next meeting in 17m" label is the single most-looked-at surface in the app. If it's ever wrong, I want to know within the hour.

Found something? Got a half-baked idea? Drop it in Discord — even a one-line "this feels weird" helps more than you'd think.

What's missing? Tell me.

Just as important as bug reports: what isn't in hora that you'd want to be? Roadmaps are guesses. The features I spend the next month on should be the ones real people actually use, not the ones I find most interesting to build.

If you catch yourself switching back to another calendar for anything specific — a particular recurring rule, a natural-language flow, a keyboard shortcut, a Gmail integration — tell me. Even "I wish it could…" one-liners are useful.

Help wanted: native-language translators

hora ships in nine languages. English and Polish I wrote. The other seven are machine-translated — functional, but almost certainly not idiomatic. Calendar phrasing ("all-day", "every other week", "respond maybe") is exactly the kind of thing automated translation gets almost right and native speakers spot in two seconds.

If you're a native speaker of German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, or Simplified Chinese and want to help polish the strings, I'd love to hear from you. A short pass through Localizable.strings goes a long way. Ping me in Discord or email hello@horacal.app. Credited in the app, obviously.

FAQ: hora public beta, TestFlight, and Discord

When does the public beta open? Friday, April 24, 2026. The TestFlight link and Discord invite go out to the waitlist that morning.

How do I join the hora Calendar beta? Sign up at horacal.app. Everyone on the waitlist gets in on Friday. After Friday, a second 200-tester batch opens via horacal.app/testflight — share that link with friends.

Is the beta free? Yes. No paywall during TestFlight. The subscription flow only activates after the App Store launch.

Is there an iPhone or iPad version? No. hora is Mac-native only. Building well for one platform first beats spreading thin across many.

What macOS version do I need? macOS 26 or later. Apple Silicon and Intel both supported.

Where do I report bugs or request features? Discord is the fastest path. Email hello@horacal.app works too, and goes straight to me — no ticketing layer in between.

Can I help translate the app? Yes, please. The non-English locales are currently machine-translated and would benefit enormously from a native speaker's pass. Reach out on Discord or by email.

Does my calendar data leave my Mac? Only to Google, the same as the Google Calendar web UI. hora's real-time sync routes a tiny change ping through a webhook I run, but the webhook never sees your event data — only a signal that something changed. The actual sync is your Mac talking to Google directly.

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Thanks for being here from the start 🙂 Friday's the first time this thing goes somewhere other than my Mac. I can't wait to see what you break.

Follow the build at @moto_szama, check out hora Calendar, or reach out at hello@horacal.app.