This post reviews Peek Calendar, an elegantly simple calendar app that helps you focus on your schedule a day at a time while having some fun along the way.

Most calendar applications for iOS try to pack as much useful information as possible onto the screen while still remaining attractive. This approach can be helpful for giving you a detailed view of your upcoming events, but it can also be a bit overwhelming. Peek calendar is a new calendar app that takes a different approach to displaying your schedule, one that focuses on simplicity and fun.

Design & Features – That Peek’s design is unique among calendar apps is immediately apparent upon launching the app. And Peek makes you work to discover its features: there is almost no explanation as to how the app works. But that is intentional and part of the fun. The app’s designers want you to play with Peek until you discover all its secrets. Peek employs bright colors and clean text throughout the app.

Seasons are indicated by different colors: blue for winter, green for spring, orange for summer, red for fall.

Instead of displaying a grid-calendar view or even a day ticker view, Peek shows the next several days as large colorful bands that stretch from screen edge to screen edge. Tapping on one of these bands unfolds that day’s events in a playful and clever accordion style animation. Duration and location information can be peeked at by swiping from left to right on an event.

Tapping on an event expands it out showing detailed information including time, duration, reminders, locations, repeats, calendar, and a delete button. The time selector uses a clever handle-slider system. Add to all this the fact that the entire app is audibly accentuated by playful clicks, pops, and other sounds and the entire experience of interacting and creating events in Peek is very tactile and something that must be experienced to really be grasped. It really does make the whole experience of using Peek quite fun.

Peek’s limited settings panel gives you limited control over its presentation including a second, more pastel theme and control over such elements as sounds and vibrations and which calendars are displayed.

Finally, Peek includes an optional shading gesture that allows the user to display the current time by shading their device’s front-facing camera with their hand. Peek has a beautiful design and a unique feature set, but remains very usable and even manages to change the way you interact with your calendar, perhaps for the better. By displaying only one day at a time the app limits the amount of information that is displayed at once, allowing you to focus intently on what matters before moving on to something else.

My Week with Peek – I use my calendar a lot for planning and recording both personal and work events. Our office also uses several shared calendars that I access on my iPhone. For the last few years, I’ve been using a different third-party calendar app as my main solution for managing my calendar on the go. When I saw Peek’s interesting and unique take on the calendar, however, I decided to test it out for a week and see how I liked it. Maybe this departure from the norm could offer some welcome change and make calendaring a more enjoyable experience.

After watching Peek’s very well done promo video on their website, I downloaded the app and opened it up. It looked pretty cool and I was excited to try it out.  I was impressed by the clean design and simplicity with which Peek displayed my information. The first time I opened the app and tapped on a day, I was dismayed to find that it was displaying events from all of my many calendars at once. Once I figured out how to disable calendars from view in Peek’s settings panel, I was in good shape. I played around with creating a few test events and viewing events I’d created previously. Then, I continued to play with Peek for the next few days and use it at work and for creating personal events at home. Here’s what I found:

The Good:

-Peek’s beautiful design and playful aesthetic did actually make creating events and viewing my calendar fun.

-Peek’s simplicity made the experience of looking at my upcoming events less stressful as it forced me to view them a day at a time.

-Once you have had the fun experience of discovering how the app functions for yourself, it is very easy and natural to use.

The Not So Good:

-Using Peek can be slow. Calendars are productivity apps. In my opinion, this means that they should allow me to get things done as quickly as possible and let me get on with my day. I’m not sure that I want my calendar app to be fun at the expense of me having more time to do the things I really enjoy. Whereas creating an event in my calendar app of choice takes just a few seconds, creating an event in Peek can take up to half a minute or more.

-There is no way to hide calendars in Peek or set a default calendar. I have 15 calendars on my iPhone when you include shared calendars. Because of the way calendars are selected when creating events (a long line of boxes), this means that each time I create an event I have to scroll through all 15 calendars to find the right one that I want to add an event to. Furthermore, Peek doesn’t allow you to set a default calendar when creating events. Because it selected a calendar I don’t use as the default calendar this means that when I create a new event the correct calendar is never selected by default.

-There’s no way to easily identify which calendar an event is listed on. When you expand a day to look at your your events, they all appear the same. Many calendar apps differentiate calendars through color coding. Not so with Peek. The only way to tell which calendar an event appears on, you have to open each event and scroll through the calendar boxes until you find which calendar the event is tied to. More than once, this limitation forced me to open up a different calendar app.

Conclusion – There is no denying that Peek is a beautifully designed and clever application. It brings a very unique approach to calendaring on iOS that differentiates it from pretty much every other calendar application available. Its designers did a great job creating a stunning visual experience. However, after using Peek for a week I feel that this app unfortunately puts form before function.

The biggest issue for me with Peek is a philosophical one. It tries and succeeds at making calendaring a fun and playful experience. The problem is that I want calendaring to be something that enables me to better and more efficiently experience my life, not a pastime in itself that I have fun with but spend extra time doing. I appreciate Peek for trying to bring something new to an everyday experience, but it doesn’t really fit in with the way I use calendars. Maybe you’ll have a different experience, though. If you’re someone who uses only one or a few calendars on your device or if you really appreciate beautiful visual design and are willing to slow down a bit when using your calendar, Peek might be a great choice for you.

For more information on Peek, check out its website here. Peek is currently on sale for 99 cents (as of 2/6/2014) and is available for download on the App Store.