Week Calendar HD - A Powerful Alternative Calendar For Your iPad

If you have an iPad, you may or may not be pleased with Apple's current offering for calendars. You'll be glad to know that Week Calendar HD feels like the native Apple Calendar, but much more powerful.

In fact, the current interface reminds me a lot of those Mac OS X Lion iCal preview shots that have been floating around lately. Although not exactly the corkboard feel, Week Calendar HD has a light brown faux leather texture surrounding the actual calendar. When you look at the calendar "page," it has little bits of torn paper at the top, which shows that the developers put a lot of effort into little details - a nice touch.

Despite the name being having "week," the app is not limited to just the week. There are also Day, Month, and Year views, as well as the good old week view. Since all the data is being fetched from the default Calendar app, there is no additional set up or hassle. You'll see all of your events, color-coded and looking pretty, in Week Calendar HD.

The Day view is split up into two panels. On the left will be the month and week number, along with a list of upcoming events. The right side will be for the individual day and any events will be shown in their designated time slots, with corresponding color. Week view gives you the month at a glance, with a red line indicating the current time (applies to Day view as well). Month and Year will highlight today's date in blue. In Year view, any days with events will be highlighted and tappable for you to view what's going on that day.

While you decide on how you want to look at your calendar events, you can toggle which calendars actually show up with the button in the top left corner. Next to that is a button with a magnifying glass, which you can search for events in. This isn't real-time search, as you have to enter in keywords and set a date range for the app to search, but the results can be retrieved in seconds.

No matter which view you're in, the bottom will have a navigation bar to navigate the day, week, month, or year. A Today button will always take you back to today and a + button allows you to add new events any time.

Events can also be edited by tapping on them. Additionally, you can tap and hold on any time slot in Day or Week view to add a new event. However you choose to enter a new event in, you'll be greeted with that familiar interface of the native Calendar app, with the Title, Location, Start/End Times, Repeat, Invitees, Alerts, Calendar, Availability, and Notes fields.

It has the native Apple feel, but makes managing your calendar a lot easier, and more efficiently. There are plenty of Settings to make the experience even better. For those that travel a lot, there is the Time Zone Support, which allows you to view event dates and times in a selected time zone of your choice. If white text isn't your cup of tea, you can also have "Always black text" on. Choice is always good. If you have events that are above the selected viewing window, there is an option to display arrows indicating this too.

Holidays can be imported, templates can be made for certain types of events you seem to enter in the calendar a lot, colors can be customized, and the best part - Auto Coloring. This allows you to automatically assign a color to events based on their title. This is just a fraction of the powerful settings that can be adjusted in Week Calendar HD.

While Week Calendar HD is a powerful alternative to your native Calendar from Apple, I'm not sure I agree with the design theme. As I am not really a fan of the upcoming iCal in Lion (that is, if they keep it that way), I do not care for the faux leather texture. I hope that the developers can either change that design, or at least give users options.

So if you're still looking for an alternative calendar for your iPad, definitely check out Week Calendar, if you don't mind the faux leather stuff.