When the Apple Watch hit Apple's virtual shelves at the end of April, the company boasted of the thousands of apps available for it. But as reviewers and owners of the Watch have pointed out numerous times, most of those apps aren't particularly useful or well designed. Now that the Watch has been out for about a month, major app makers that waited to get the device in hand are now releasing their apps, with much better results. Todoist's app for the Apple Watch arrived last week, bringing useful task management to your wrist. Today, Fantastical is launching its app for the Apple Watch, and it too improves upon Apple's included calendar app.

Like most Apple Watch apps, Fantastical offers both an app and a Glance, which can be pulled up quicker than the full app. Where Apple's included calendar only displays a maximum of seven days of events, Fantastical can show twice as many. And like Fantastical on the iPhone, iPod, or Mac, the app integrates support for Apple's Reminders service with calendar events. Events and reminders can be added using a Force Touch and voice dictation, and Fantastical will display the words parsed before it completes the action — a confirmation Apple's apps don't offer. That data is then run through Fantastical's natural language engine, which automatically pulls out times and locations for events.

Fantastical's Glance is simpler, displaying the next item on your calendar or the next thing on your to-do list, whichever is due first. Since Apple doesn't yet let third-party developers access complications on the watch face, swiping up to reveal the Glance is the quickest way to access the app. Seeing my calendar with just one tap from a complication on my chosen watch face has been one of the most useful things I've found with the Apple Watch, and it's likely that Fantastical will add that once Apple allows for it. For now, Fantastical says the app takes advantage of everything that Apple offers to developers on the Apple Watch.

Fantastical for Apple Watch is included with the iPhone app starting today, which sells for $4.99. With WWDC right around the corner, Apple is likely to announce a suite of more powerful tools for developers that want to work with the Apple Watch, which should result in even better and more useful apps on your wrist.

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