Each of those reviews prompted a good number of Macworld readers to respond, via email and our forums, by praising Smelly Puppy's $3 (). The gist of those comments can be summed up as, "QuickCal does the same thing and is cheaper!" While that claim isn't quite accurate, as you'll see shortly, QuickCal is nevertheless a nifty iCal add-on that I'd been planning to cover as a Mac Gem.
Like Fantastical, QuickCal lives in your menu bar, with its icon displaying the current date. Click that icon, and you see a list of upcoming events and their times, organized by date. You choose, in QuickCal's preferences, which calendars (iCal or Google Calendar) appear in the menu, as well has how many days' worth of events (up to seven); you can also choose to have each calendar's color displayed, in the form of a small circle, next to each event. It's a convenient way to get a quick look at your schedule for the next few days, although the menu is narrow enough that longer event names are often cut off.
To view more info about an event, hover the cursor over that event; after a second or two, a tooltip (a floating text box) appears to display the event's location, notes, and the like. However, unlike with Fantastical, you can't edit or delete events from within QuickCal--selecting an event in the menu opens the event for editing in your default calendar program (for iCal- or BusyCal-hosted calendars) or in Google Calendar in your browser (for Google Calendar calendars configured from within QuickCal).
QuickCal's other Fantastical-like feature is that it lets you quickly create calendar events using natural language, similar to iCal in Lion (Mac OS X 10.7). Choose New Event from QuickCal's menu (or press your preferred new-event keyboard shortcut), and an attractive new-event window appears on the screen. Type a description of the event, such as Macworld Staff Meeting Friday 10a in Rm500, and QuickCal parses that text to figure out the details of the event--in this case, an event called Macworld Staff Meeting that will take place next Friday at 10am in Rm500. You see QuickCal's interpretation of your description right there in the event window, letting you make sure it's getting the details right.
In my testing, QuickCal's natural-language interpretation is good, although it's not quite as good as Fantastical's. For example, if I type Rm500, Fantastical figures out that Rm500 is a location; with QuickCal, I must remember to type in Rm500. I also had trouble getting QuickCal to create events in calendars other than my default calendar. The developer claims you can simply type part of a calendar name in the event-entry box, but in my experience, QuickCal often instead uses that text as part of the event name, location, or other field.