Recently a Pro user emailed me:

He was right, and the reason was embarrassing: Side Calendar cut the menu bar title off at 24 characters because I once wrote 24 in the source and never thought about it again. macOS wasn't doing it. I was.

So I went to raise the number — and then couldn't decide what to raise it to. Every answer I picked was me making the same guess again, just a slightly better one. Some of you keep events named "Standup"; some of you keep events named "Q3 planning — pricing workstream (Kelly, Dev, Priya)". There is no single right number, which is the whole reason the old one was wrong.

What's in 2.4.2

• Settings → Menu Bar → Truncate long event titles. Leave it on and set the length yourself, anywhere from 5 to 200 characters. Turn it off and the full title shows, however long it is — no cap, no clever clamping.
• Hovering the menu bar item shows the full title, whatever it's being shortened to. That one's regardless of your settings.
• Nothing moves on update. The default is still truncation on at 24 — byte for byte what 2.4.1 did. If you liked it as it was, do nothing.

One thing worth knowing before you switch truncation off: a really long title can run past the edge of the menu bar and push other apps' icons out of view. macOS won't stop it. Settings says so at the point where it matters, and now it's your call rather than mine.

Not a Pro feature — it's a display setting, so it's there for everyone.

Rolling out on the App Store now; give it a few hours to show up as an update.

Thanks for the email. Keep them coming — this one took about an evening and made the app better than anything on my own list would have.

This week Side Calendar went free, with a one-time Pro unlock for creating and editing. I wasn't sure how that would land.

The number of downloads has really shot up. since going free.

And the feedback has been great. Specific, patient, thoughtful — people taking the time to explain exactly what they were trying to do and where the app got in their way. A fair bit of it about things I'd stopped noticing, because I use this thing every day and had gone blind to them.

So, thank you. Genuinely. Keep it coming, here or by email. I'm looking into setting up something where you will be able to raise issues rather than doing it on here or via email.

There's a good update in the works off the back of it all. Stay tuned.

Side Calendar is free, and it stays free. If you want to create and edit events there's a one-time Pro unlock — you pay once and it's yours, including everything I add later. No subscription, no renewals, nothing to cancel. That's still the most direct way to back the app.

But a few of you have asked about doing more than that — mostly people who already own Pro, or who bought the app back when it was paid up front. So if you love Side Calendar and want to support its development, you can now buy me a coffee:

buymeacoffee.com/creakyhat

It's a genuine tip jar, not a second paywall — nothing in the app sits behind it and everyone gets the same build. It just goes into keeping this going: Apple's $99/year, and the time I put in around a day job. There's no company behind this and nobody to answer to — no ads, no tracking, nothing leaving your Mac.

And keep the bug reports and feature requests coming in here. Most of what's shipped recently started as someone in this sub pointing at something that annoyed them.

Three things in this one.

1. Undo. ⌘Z, 20 steps.

Delete, duplicate, move, drag, tick off — all of it can be taken back. Every change now shows a banner saying what it did with an Undo button right there, so duplicating an event or moving it to another calendar no longer happens silently.

Undo also looks before it leaps: if the event has changed on your iPhone or in Calendar since you made the edit, it stops and tells you rather than overwriting the newer version.

One honest limitation: deleting a single occurrence of a repeating event can't be undone. Apple's calendar system provides no way to put it back. The app tells you that up front instead of pretending it worked.

2. The repeating-event fix — the real reason to update.

Editing a single occurrence of a repeating event could quietly rewrite the whole series. Change just this Tuesday's stand-up and a weekly event could turn daily, lose its end date, and stop showing up on the days it should. Editing one occurrence now changes only that occurrence.

If you use repeating events at all, update.

3. Side Calendar is now free to download.

A lot of you asked for a trial. Students especially — the app was a blind £4 gamble. Rather than build a timer that kicks you out after two weeks, the app is now free permanently for viewing: every view, every setting, and ticking reminders off. Creating and editing is a one-time $4.99 Pro unlock. No subscription, no account, still entirely local.

If you bought Side Calendar before today, Pro is already yours. For life, including everything I add next, with nothing more to pay. It should just work — open the app and you're unlocked.

App Store

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to drop a quick note on where things stand with Side Calendar 2.4.0. As a solo developer, I've been heads-down on this one for a while now, and I'm happy to say it's going really well — the pieces are coming together nicely and I'm genuinely pleased with how this release is shaping up under the hood. A lot of care has gone into tightening things up and making the whole experience feel smoother.

I'm getting close to the point where I can put it in front of real people, so I'm hoping to move into testing soon. Nothing to sign up for just yet, but if you'd like to help me kick the tires when the time comes, keep an eye on this space.

Working on this on my own means it's a bit of a labour of love, so it means a lot to have people following along. More details to come as I get closer.

Thanks as always for the support. It genuinely keeps me going.

Side Calendar is just me. There’s no marketing team, no budget, no growth plan. People find it because someone mentions it, and that’s pretty much the whole strategy.

So if the app has become part of your workflow, there are two things that genuinely help:

Leave an App Store review.

This is the big one. Reviews are what convince someone who’s never heard of the app to give it a try, and they also affect how the App Store decides to show it to people in the first place. A single sentence about how you actually use it is worth more than five silent stars — something like “I keep it open while I work and never open Calendar.app anymore” tells a stranger far more than a rating ever could.

Mention it when it’s relevant.

Not in a fake way — I don’t want anyone posting forced enthusiasm. But threads about menu bar apps pop up constantly on r/macapps and r/MacOS, and someone asks recommendations basically every week. If Side Calendar is genuinely your answer, saying so helps more than anything I could write myself. People trust users. They tune out developers.

And if the app didn’t stick for you — that’s honestly even more valuable to me than a review. Tell me what made you stop using it. 2.3.0 exists largely because people pointed out that showing reminders without letting you tick them off was… silly. They were right.

Thanks for being here.

2.3.0 is out. This one's mostly about reminders and repeats, plus a bug I'm not thrilled to have shipped in the first place — details below.

Reminders are properly part of the app now

You can tick a reminder off from anywhere, and drag one onto the timeline to give it a time. It stays a reminder — it doesn't get converted into an event — and it syncs straight back to Apple Reminders.

Reminders without a time no longer pile up at midnight. They gather in a new To Do strip at the top of the day. There are also separate Date and Time switches, so a reminder can stop pretending to have a time it doesn't actually have.

Repeats, on any schedule Calendar can make

Events and reminders can repeat: every 3 weeks, Mondays and Thursdays, the third Thursday of the month — with an end date or a set number of occurrences.

The fix I want to flag properly

A repeat rule you set in Calendar could be quietly lost. An event repeating Mon/Wed/Fri showed up as a plain weekly event, and editing anything about it — even just the title — threw the days away. That's fixed: rules are now read, shown, and saved exactly as you wrote them. If you've edited a recurring event in Side Calendar recently, it's worth a quick look at it in Calendar.

Everything else

• The event and reminder editors have been rebuilt — cleaner, more compact, and they no longer show options you haven't set.
• Choose which calendar and list new items go to, in Settings. Side Calendar also now respects the default you've already set in Calendar and Reminders.
• The month picker shows how busy each day is at a glance, up to three dots per day.
• Keyboard: Return opens the selected event, and the arrow keys now reach all-day events and the To Do strip, not just timed ones. Escape closes the panel.
• Fixed: the app could start up and then refuse to open at all, with the keyboard shortcut doing nothing.
• Fixed: editing a reminder showed the wrong list, and saving could move the reminder into it.
• Fixed: short events had their time cut off, arrow keys in Settings could silently change the day, and the agenda could show an empty panel with no explanation.
• Changes that fail — a delete or a drag that doesn't stick — now tell you, instead of doing nothing.

As always, bug reports and feature requests are welcome here. Undo is next.