A calendar for every time zone, and a lot more you can do with your events

Today we’re releasing a big update to Fastmail’s calendar. If you work with people in other time zones, you can now keep their time on screen as you plan your day. Every event has a full set of actions a right-click away, and events that appear on more than one of your calendars are finally shown just once.

A world clock for your calendar

Head to Settings → Calendar preferences and you’ll find a new World clock section. Add the places you care about, whether that’s where your team is, where your family lives, or where you’re travelling next.

Once you’ve added some, the current time in each one appears in the calendar sidebar on desktop, under the mini calendar. Click any of them to see your whole calendar in that time zone. It’s handy for working out what your day will look like when you land.

Extra time zones on day and week view

In day and week view, each of your world clock time zones can get its own column of hours alongside yours, so you can see at a glance that 9am for you is 5pm in London. The current time line runs across them all too.

Choose how much room they take up: show them always (if there’s space), only on hover or tap, so they slide out when you point at the hours, or never. You can change this in the world clock settings, or right from the calendar.

Click the name at the top of an extra time column for a menu: view your calendar in that time zone, remove it, add another time zone, or jump to the world clock settings. You can also drag the columns around to reorder them. Drag one onto the main column to switch your calendar to that time zone.

When you’re viewing your calendar in another time zone, your own time zone now always stays on screen right next to it, so you never lose track of what time it is for you.

Know when it is for everyone invited

When you open or edit an event with other participants in your organisation, we’ll now show what time it is for them too, if they’re in a different time zone to you. A 4pm meeting in Melbourne is a 6am one in London, and it’s good to know before you send that invitation. This works for all the other people in your Fastmail account.

Do more with your events

Right-click any event in the calendar, or long-press it on a touchscreen, for a menu of things you can do with it. You’ll find the same options in the More menu when you open an event.

• Duplicate: start a new event with all the same details, ready to adjust and save. If it’s a meeting you organised, the same people are invited again.
• Go to next/previous occurrence: hop through a repeating event without paging through weeks of calendar.
• Email all attendees: start an email to everyone invited, sent from the address you were invited at.
• Download: save the event as an .ics file to share or import elsewhere.
• Edit and Delete, of course.

The calendars in your sidebar have a menu too. Right-click one to quickly create an event in it, change its colour or name, or open its settings. Choose Show only this calendar to hide everything else for a moment, and Show all calendars to bring them all back. You can also drag and drop to reorder them, right in the sidebar.

Clicking an event’s location now gives you options to open it in a map, get directions there, or copy it.

One event, however many calendars it’s on

If someone shares their calendar with you and also invites you to their meetings, you used to see every one of those meetings twice: once on their calendar and once on yours. Now, when the same event is on more than one of your calendars, we show it just once, striped in each calendar’s colour.

When you edit or delete an event like this, we’ll ask which calendar you mean. And if it’s a meeting you organised, we’ll check whether you want to change the event for everyone, or just your own alerts and settings.

A fresh look for events

We’ve refined the event view to make the important details easier to see, with the calendar right at the top and the time before the location. Free/busy now only appears where it makes a difference, and when you edit an invitation from someone else, we only show the things you can actually change.

Invitations you haven’t replied to yet now have a dashed outline, so they stand out from the events you’ve accepted. Ones you’ve declined are faded back (if you’ve chosen to keep them visible) so they don’t get in your way.

And it’s faster

Finally, we’ve made the calendar quicker when there’s a lot going on. Scrolling through busy months, and loading events as you go, now does less work behind the scenes, so it feels much smoother, especially with lots of calendars or repeating events.

We hope these changes make it easier to stay on top of your schedule, wherever the people in it happen to be. Give them a try and let us know what you think!