Riff Calendar: the calendar you zoom

Tyler HallBuilding Mac apps since 2006

On Mastodon, 2 September 2026

This is seriously impressive. It’s rare to find such a well-done new take on an established category like calendar apps.

The whole calendar, always in view

Zoom out to find a free weekend. Zoom in to pick the hour. Every stop on the way is a working calendar: three weeks for a trip, one day for a dinner, three days for a long weekend. The day you were looking at stays on screen the whole way.

Three weeks, one day, the weeks ahead, then just the long weekends.

Place it, title it, done.

Hold an empty slot and an event appears. Type the title and you’re done. An event you’ve had before comes back after a few letters, details and all. A place, an alert and a repeat appear only when you ask.

Pressed into place, slid down in five-minute steps, and a few letters finish the title.

See every change as you make it

Select an event and its details open beneath the calendar, still in view. Slide the event to its new hour right on the page. Add a weekly repeat, pick its end date, and the weeks ahead fill the moment you apply.

A new hour, a weekly repeat, and an end date picked three weeks out.

The calendar itself, as a widget

Riff comes with two kinds of Home Screen widgets, each in three sizes. The first kind is the calendar itself. Every event is drawn at its hour, with its length and its name. Here it shows three days. You can set it to one day or to two whole weeks. The second kind, Up next, lists what is up next.

The large Riff widget: Tuesday 15, Wednesday 16 and Thursday 17 as three columns of hours from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, each event a named block at its time and length. A visit from Grandma and Grandpa spans the top, a morning check-in repeats on each day, and Tuesday's late morning holds four meetings side by side. — Three days at true scale on the large widget, the day’s list on the medium.

The medium Up next widget under the heading Tuesday 15: the Grandma and Grandpa visit, Project planning from 10:00 to 11:00, a customer call at 10:30, Roadmap sync at 11:15, and a count of four more. — Three days at true scale on the large widget, the day’s list on the medium.

Your calendars, not copies of them

Work Personal Family

Riff works directly on the calendars already on your iPhone: iCloud, Google, Exchange, whatever Apple Calendar sees. There is no Riff account and nothing to import. Events you create or move in Riff show up everywhere else. Delete the app and your data hasn’t gone anywhere.

Data collected: none

Riff has no server, no account and no analytics. Your events pass between Apple’s calendar database and your screen. Riff adds no stop of its own. Not collecting data isn’t a policy. There is nowhere for it to go. The beta adds one channel, and it is Apple’s, not Riff’s: TestFlight sends its standard crash and usage reports to Apple and the developer.

What to expect in the beta

Rough edges. It’s a beta, and the point of TestFlight is finding them.
iPhone only, and it needs iOS 26. No iPad, no watch, no Android.
Invitations can be answered, not sent.

Try it

Someone asks when you’re free. This time, nobody waits.

Join the beta on TestFlight

Or drop me a line. Feedback shapes what gets built next.