TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Dr. Drang on Fantastical’s animations, which show you how it’s interpreting your calendar event as you type it:

This is not just eye candy. The animations are providing instant feedback on how Fantastical is parsing your words and, more important, they’re teaching you Fantastical’s syntax. This is tremendously useful because, despite the wonderful flexibility of NLP, there’s always a syntax and you need to learn it if you’re going to use the product.

It really is a brilliant user interface. There’s no need for a text label (or walk-through or whatever) telling you how it works, because it demonstrates to you how it works as you type, and teaches you how it parses event text, too.

It seems so obvious, but that’s only because they spent so much time thinking through how it should work. Incredible work.