*Today* Horizon calendar ships a major update. Gone are two of the biggest drawbacks of the application: bad icon and no natural language input. The former was one of the biggest reasons I wouldn’t put the app on my Home screen and the latter is a nice little extra for me.

The new icon took me a week to get used to, I didn’t like it at first, but now quite a while into using the app with the new icon I really do like the icon. Horizon is now my default, Home screen, calendar app. It’s a fantastic app and I really do enjoy using it.

One thing that I like about the app which I didn’t mention when I first reviewed it: is in the list view, you simply cannot go back in time. You can only see today and everything forward from there. This is actually a great touch, something that I think more calendar apps should incorporate.

We don’t need to accidentally get stuck in the past — man that happens to me *a lot*.

Two annoyances about the app:

1. The new natural language parser (while good) offers no feedback in [the way that Fantastical does][1]. I wish it did, but this is minor for me as I use Siri for new events the majority of the time.
2. Launch speed. I know (from beta notes) that the developer has been working hard on speeding up the app launch, but it’s still a tick too long for me (though better than it was). For me this is the one thing that Horizon really needs to improve on to take the app to that next level.

If you haven’t tried out Horizon because you have Agenda, or Fantastical, then I suggest that you do. In the same way that Agenda and Fantastical are different apps, so too is Horizon and [it’s a worthy purchase for calendar nerds][2].

[1]: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/04/whats-really-great-about-fantastical/
[2]: http://horizonapp.me