As I described in my review, I have a bit of an obsession with calendar apps. I have continued to use Fantastical over the past year, but while I appreciate its polish, there are many proprietary features of Google Calendar that third-party API clients don’t fully support. This means that I often still have to use the web app to invite people to events, for example.
This is not unique to Google Calendar; Gmail has the same problem. I’ve been using Mimestream which is based on the Gmail API, but even that doesn’t support all features like snooze. Then there’s muscle memory; while the web Gmail interface is far from perfect, it is familiar. This is why apps like Mailplane, which was essentially a site-specific browser around the web Gmail app, had a strong following. Unfortunately, they stopped selling licences back in 2021.
I got tired of constantly switching back and forth between dedicated apps and browser tabs, but wanted to retain a proper Mac experience for Google Workspace. But unlike Mailplane, I wanted to give the same level of attention to detail to both Gmail and Google Calendar.
Thanks to coding agents, I was able to make a proof of concept very quickly. Over the past few months I’ve been gradually adding features and improving the polish1, and finally have something to share. The result is Magimail and Magical.
Both apps are stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis, and available to download from macmagic.app. Bug reports and code contributions on GitHub are both appreciated!
I’ll write some future blog posts outlining the architecture and technical challenges. ↩︎