Mac Calendars

For a long time i used Cron as my calendar application. I liked it just fine:

• I hate having email or my calendar in a browser tab because I habitually close tabs and then lose what I am working on

• Cron had the ability to block meetings from one calendar to another — very useful!

• Cron had a nice menubar notification for when meetings were starting.

I am very particular (judgmental, even!) about Mac menu bars — but I think having the next meeting showing in my Mac menu bar is very very useful since I dislike calendar notifications.

Cron was recently acquired by Notion and has been descending in quality since then:

• I can never remember that its now called Notion Calendar and not Cron in Raycast

• It now takes 5-10 seconds to launch

I decided to try the new Safari feature that turns websites into dock applications — super easy!

But the downside of that was that it doesn't have a menu bar icon (or block calendars, but so far Cron is mysteriously still doing that for me in the background without even having Cron installed…)

I found a great Mac app called MeetingBar. It does a really really good job at showing the next meeting in the menubar. It actually does this way better than Cron.

I love that you can configure it to open different meeting links in different apps. So Zoom meetings open directly in Zoom (no more browser step) but Google Hangouts meetings launch in Chrome (not Safari)

You can also write Regex statements to not show certain meetings. For example I block my calendar when I need to do real work (or eat) and I don't need a reminder of those things in the menubar: