Apple’s Calendar app recently became a lot more compelling. iOS 18 upgrades, a new AI feature, and integration with the Apple Invites app have provided several more reasons to use Apple’s native app. But there’s another recent change you may not know about: an iOS 18 trick to make the app’s Month view more useful than ever on iPhone.
Calendar’s Month View now offers a hidden pinch-to-zoom gesture
When Apple shipped iOS 18, it included several changes to the built-in Calendar app. Highlights included:
- full support for Apple Reminders inside the app
- design refresh with several nice UI touch-ups
- and an updated Month view
Whether you’re already familiar with these changes or not, there’s a key detail you may not have known.
This last change—the updated Month view—arrived with a hidden gesture for customizing what’s displayed to your exact liking.
Previously, Calendar’s Month view was not very useful on iPhone. It showed you the dates, with colored dots representing days containing events. But you couldn’t see any event details.
Now in iOS 18, you can switch between three different Month options: Compact, Stacked, and Details. These are available from the view button in the top-right corner.
However, there’s also an alternative method for switching between these modes that provides even more flexibility and customization.
You can pinch to zoom the Month view to resize it to your liking.
This ultimately enables several different views with different levels of data:
- At its smallest size, you’ll see the same ‘dot’ view as before (‘Compact’ mode).
- But pinch to zoom a little, and you’ll see a new design that shows multiple colored bars depicting events from different calendars (‘Stacked’ mode).
- Zoom even further and Month view will show event titles.
- And zoom even more to see not only titles but also event times.
- Finally, you can zoom further to give each day more space for events.
Play around with it on your iPhone and you can find a setup that works just right for you.
Flexibility of zoom gesture for all Calendar users
Historically, I’ve never liked Month view on my iPhone despite using it all the time on my iPad.
But thanks to these iOS 18 changes, it’s now one of my preferred ways to use Calendar on iPhone.
The flexibility of the new pinch-to-zoom gesture lets me optimize the iPhone’s limited screen real estate in a way that works well for my needs.
If you have a heavily calendared life, you can zoom so much that only a couple weeks are displayed but with ample space for lots of daily events.
Or if you’re like me and have more moderate calendar needs, you can zoom out a bit more to see several weeks while retaining important event details.
What do you think of the Calendar app’s new Month view? What’s your preferred view? Let us know in the comments.
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