We are busy preparing major new updates of our top-selling iPhone apps, SmartCal and SmartTime.  SmartCal 3.1 is undergoing final testing, and the all-new SmartTime 5 for iOS5 will be released alongside iOS5.  Here is a quick summary of each app, how they are similar, and how they are different.

What is SmartCal?

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SmartCal is a complete organizer: Calendar, Task List, Check-lists, and Projects. No other iPhone app does nearly as much. Task View shows, in list form, how many tasks you can get done each day for an entire week. The magic is that it takes into account your appointments for each day, and also your working hours for each day of the week. There is an option to automatically integrate your Tasks directly into the Calendar. You can sort and prioritize directly from the Calendar or from Task View. Task View also features one-tap filters to help organize things for you, and has one-tap Contexts so you can organize everything according to GTD. Projects View organizes your tasks by Project, and shows the progress of each project as you mark your tasks “done”. SmartCal syncs Events directly with the iPhone calendar, and syncs Tasks with Toodledo, the free online task list.

SmartCal 3 features the all-new Thumb Planner: a pull-down, full-month calendar right in the middle of your Day calendar. Thumb Planner shows All-Day Events and also acts as a navigator. You can pull the Thumb Planner up and down to show only one week, two weeks, or an entire month. Drag items from the main Calendar into the Thumb Planner, for quick and easy changes to your schedule. Check out the Video here.

What is SmartTime?

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SmartTime™ is the world’s first integrated calendar, now with over one million downloads. It shows all of your tasks and appointments, always integrated, just like your day. SmartTime™ features three unique views – Calendar, Smart, and Focus. Each view shows exactly the same information – your tasks and your appointments – but in different ways. Calendar shows your tasks integrated with your events, same as SmartCal’s calendar. Smart View shows your tasks and events in a beautiful 3-D list with “dynamic day lines” that separate your days from each other. Focus View shows the same information but with a focus on today: Today’s Appointments and Tasks, as well as the Tasks that you have completed during the day. It’s a great way to track progress.

SmartTime™ boasts full integration with the iPhone: You can make phone calls or send text messages from within any Event or Task that has a Contact in it; you can also jump directly to Google Maps to find their location.  Perhaps most unique, you can actually send a Smart Task to another SmartTime user via Email. Their own version of SmartTime will accept the task and find time for them to do it! Great for teachers, parents, or honey-do’s!

How are they the same?

SmartCal and SmartTime both use SmartTime™ logic to look at the free time in-between your appointments, then find time for your tasks. Both have the same Calendar view, and both also feature our unique landscape Week and Month views which we pioneered nearly three years ago – just flip your iPhone sideways. We hear that certain other developers are also working on similar solutions.  We’re flattered!

How are they different?

SmartTime finds time for you automatically. SmartCal does it manually. Once SmartTime has integrated your tasks into your calendar, you can move the tasks around with your fingertip and it automatically adjusts the order of all other tasks, adaptively. SmartCal gives you more direct control: it uses the priority order of your Tasks that you determine from Tasks view, and drops them into your Calendar. It even splits tasks to fit.

SmartCal has a separate Task view, a separate Projects view, and has recurring check-lists.  So in some ways, it does more.  SmartCal also has exactly the same logic as SmartPad for iPad. SmartTime integrates more with your iPhone.

What’s new in SmartCal 3.1?

Performance, performance, performance! SmartCal 3 introduced significant new features including the Thumb Planner, and it extended the logic from the ‘current day’ to an entire week. These new features came at a price: slower performance for people with large databases. We have improved the performance, memory management, and overall stability while also adding the ability to synchronize a smaller subset of our appointments. That allows you to enjoy the full feature set of SmartCal.

SmartCal 3.1 also features automatic background sync: now, you don’t have to do anything!

What’s new in SmartTime 5.0?

SmartTime 5 for iOS5 has four major new features:

  1. Direct sync of both Tasks and Events to your iPhone Calendar (another world first!)
  2. Recurring Tasks  (we listened to you!)
  3. The return of our popular Alert Snooze. Now you won’t lose your alert if you’re in the middle of doing something else!
  4. Made for iOS5:  Now you can create new calendars in your iPhone calendar, directly from SmartTime!

Special Offer: Buy SmartTime 4 now for the low price of $4.99, and the upgrade to SmartTime 5 will be free.  SmartTime 5 will retail for $9.99.

Which one is best for me?

There’s no need to make a decision. Think of it as trying two different coffee drinks at Starbucks. That’s the cost, except you get to keep both!

Also in the Oven…

We’re busy implementing our strategy to connect all of our apps and to make them available on more platforms. We are adding creative features in existing apps, as well as an all-new creative app. Take a look at what we have in the oven, for release this year and early next year:

  • ScrapBook for iPad – a finger-intuitive book for storing, organizing, and showing off your photos, trips, and ideas.
  • mySmartDay.com – a web-based productivity tool that serves as the hub for all of our apps on iPhones, iPods, iPads and Mac.
  • SmartDay for Mac – an “always on” calendar and planner for your Mac that syncs with your iPhone and iPad apps.
  • SmartPlans 3 with integrated calendars and cascading task detail.
  • SmartPad 3 with intuitive links and notes so you can “see the connection” from any point.
  • Synchronization of SmartTime, SmartCal, SmartPad, SmartPlans and SmartDay Mac, all via mySmartDay.com.

Did We Mention…

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SmartNotes is our first app that runs on iPhone, iPad, AND on the web!  Now you can synchronize between all three and you can have the full functionality of SmartNotes directly from the beta version of mySmartDay.com .  All you need is a free sync account that you create from within SmartNotes. Try it out. It’s the first step of our web strategy and you’ll soon see us adding other components including calendars, tasks, projects, and more…

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Meanwhile, SmartPlans is in the top 50 of all business apps (out of over 3,000) and is the top-selling project management tool on the iTunes store.  Use SmartPlans to plan out your projects, and move them around on the interactive Gantt chart so you can get a feeling of the balance between the length of each project and your need to work 40 hours a week (or however many you set). You can sync Project tasks with Toodledo, then pass those on to SmartPad for integration into your day.  Read this article about how you can integrate SmartPlans with SmartPad: Plan with SmartPlans, Execute with SmartPad

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Last but not least, SmartPad is our iPad powerhouse. Since we released it last year, it has consistently been ranked in the top 2% of all Productivity apps on the iTunes app store. No other tool combines Calendars, Tasks, Projects AND Notes. Anyone who sits in a class or in meetings will appreciate this feature: You can take notes directly into SmartPad, then highlight any selection to automatically create linked follow-ups!