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.

Every stop of the zoom is a working calendar

Zoom out to find a free weekend. Zoom in to pick the hour. 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. Type a title you’ve used before and Riff fills in the place and alert from last time. Otherwise the title is all Riff asks for.

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

The calendar stays open while you edit

Select an event and its details open beneath the calendar, the days around it 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 three kinds of Home Screen widgets. The first kind is the calendar itself, in three sizes. 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 draws five weeks at once, every event still at its hour and its length. The third, 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.

Before you download

iPhone only, and it needs iOS 26 or later. No iPad, no watch, no Android.
Invitations can be answered, not sent.

Try it

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

Get Riff on the App Store

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