Screenshot courtesy of QuickCal
Lately, the team at Smelly Puppy has been using its prized scheduling app, QuickCal, to help with more than calendar issues.
QuickCal, as we explained last summer, takes natural language expressions describing calendar events or tasks and creates those events and tasks in iCal. So, for instance, instead of opening iCal and entering an hour-long coffee meeting with John, you’d open QuickCal, enter “Coffee w/ John 3-4pm” and let QuickCal take it from there.
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The app is an offering from Omaha-based Smelly Puppy, a side project for Jim Boutcher (left, photo courtesy of Boutcher), Christian Bender and a handful of other programmers.
As Boutcher watched devastation grip Japan following the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country last week, he decided the app could be used to assist the relief effort.
“We took QuickCal for the iPhone (which normally costs $.99) and changed it to a free app over the weekend,” Boutcher said, “and basically said instead of paying us for this, help Japan somehow.”
After close to 20,000 downloads in four days, Boutcher is happy to think his app helped make a difference.
“I still have a lot of family back there,” said Boutcher, who has a brother that lived in Japan for years and a sister-in-law who’s from the country. “So I wanted to do something.”
That’s not the only international exposure QuickCal has gotten lately. Boutcher and company also recently localized QuickCal into German in response to a couple major blogs in the country highlighting the app. Boutcher announced that project Feb. 28 on the Smelly Puppy blog. In a phone interview Wednesday, Boutcher said the German version of QuickCal had risen as high as No. 6 among paid productivity apps and No. 19 among all paid apps.
The sort of success QuickCal has seen since its launch in German is hardly unprecedented for the app, which was a mainstay in the top 10 free apps in the English-speaking app store before it became a paid app. QuickCal was first introduced as a desktop widget for Mac OS and moved to the iPhone about a year ago. It was released for Mac OS last month and rose as high as No. 4 among free productivity apps and into the top 40 among all free apps.
“We think we’ve nailed getting events created quicker than any other solution out there,” Boutcher said in an email last month. “So now we’re turning the focus to getting them created correctly.”
Here’s a short explainer video showing off QuickCal’s Mac OS app (video from Quicktipps on Vimeo).
For more on QuickCal, check out these recent stories from other outlets:
- This or That: “5 Mac OS Apps That Make Life A Little Easier“
- LifeHacker: “QuickCal Desktop Quickly Schedules Events from Plain English”
