One Month Building a Better Calendar App for macOS

On July 1, I put hora Calendar on the Mac App Store because I needed the app to meet real calendars. Before that, it was easy to believe I had built the right thing. Once people started using it with their own meetings, holidays, birthdays, and half-planned workdays, the gaps became much harder to ignore.

A month later, the app feels different. Not because it has been turned into a new product, but because the assumptions underneath it have changed. What looked like small calendar details at launch turned out to be the things that decide whether a calendar app for macOS feels trustworthy or merely looks good in a screenshot.

Launching was the beginning, not the finish

hora began with one deliberately narrow idea: build a great desktop home for Google Calendar. iCloud has Calendar. Exchange has Outlook. Google is still mostly web-first, even though many of us spend our entire workday on a Mac. I have often thought about Mimestream, a focused native Gmail client, as the closest analogy. I wanted that kind of attention for the calendar.

At the end of June, I thought we were close. The first month showed me where “close” was not close enough. A calendar is full of rules that are easy to overlook until one of them breaks: a repeated meeting that changes for one week, a birthday that should not behave like a normal event, a Focus Time block that needs to mean something different from a meeting.

Google Calendar is not just a list of events

The recurring-events work is the clearest example. I spent more time on it than I expected to. The bugs were not dramatic, but they revealed that I had been treating recurring meetings too simply. Google Calendar has a native model for series, exceptions, and edits. Once I went back to the API documentation and followed that model properly, hora stopped trying to approximate those rules and started respecting them.

The same lesson led to native support for Birthday events, within the Google Calendar scope, and for the Workspace event types people already know: Work Location, Focus Time, and Out of Office. hora also understands events created from Gmail, such as travel reservations. Some of these events are intentionally not editable, but they should still be easy to find and understand instead of looking like broken data.

That work changed the question I ask when adding a feature. It is no longer “can hora display this?” It is “does hora preserve what this event means in Google Calendar?”

The event editor had to catch up

Once the underlying events became more precise, the way they are created had to become simpler. The old split between Quick Add and New Event was asking people to choose a mode before they had even entered the event. That was the wrong trade-off.

They are now one panel. You can begin by writing an event in natural language and press Enter when the suggestion is right. If the event needs more detail, the same place lets you set a date, add guests, attach conferencing or a location, and choose the right event type. It is a small interaction change, but it makes the app feel much less like two separate tools sharing one window.

This is also where the phrase Google Calendar time blocking app becomes more useful than it sounds. hora is not trying to build a parallel planning universe beside Google Calendar. When you put a Focus Time block between real meetings, it should live alongside the same recurring events, work locations, and calendar rules that shaped the rest of the week.

The parts around the calendar matter too

The same month included less glamorous work that I now think is just as important. Settings were not wrong, but they were not telling a clear story. I simplified and reorganized them so the choices that shape a calendar are easier to find: how a week starts, the clock and time zone you use, whether the view follows the current time, which calendars appear where.

The calendar list in the sidebar also received a quieter improvement. Its toggles now use native SwiftUI controls. It is not the kind of change that earns a product keynote slide, but it is exactly what I want a Mac app to feel like: familiar enough that you stop noticing the control and keep looking at your week.

I also reworked the early experience for new users. The goal was straightforward: let people see their own data in the app and understand the workflow before an upgrade decision interrupts them. The rest of the first month is full of changes like this, none dramatic in isolation, but together they make the app considerably more considered than the July 1 build.

What the first month changed

There is a temptation to describe any calendar product as a planner. I do not think that is the interesting part of hora. A calendar app for productivity should not lecture you about how to work or force every commitment into a new framework. Its job is to make the calendar you already rely on faster to read, more honest about what each event means, and easier to adjust when the day changes.

That is the direction I am taking from here. The next updates will continue to make hora more capable, but the standard is now clearer: the details have to hold up in a genuinely busy week. One month after launch, it is already much better than it was. And I am only getting started.

If you would like to try the current build, download hora Calendar from the Mac App Store.