Finding a common time when a group of people can meet has been a recurring theme of my life for a couple of decades now. Back in the old days, it was often finding common times for project meetings at work. For more than a decade, it has also included scheduling podcast episodes with a disparate group of panelists. And as an independent type person, I often need to schedule Zoom meetings with a random collection of people in different time zones with different schedules.

Looking at Fantastical meeting sign-ups.My calendar app has never really done this job well, so I’ve used a bunch of web-based tools to facilitate this work, most notably Doodle and (more recently) StrawPoll. As of last week, though, my calendar app does do this—because last week Flexibits announced Fantastical 3.6, an update to its subscription-based calendar app that adds a new web-based scheduler.

Fantastical’s scheduler works both ways. If you’re trying to find a common time, you can create an event with multiple possible times, and then generate a link to send to potential participants. They can respond on the web with the times they’re available, and—this is maybe my favorite part—you can see their responses right within Fantastical.…