Utilities

Upcoming, the venerable social events calendar that was founded in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, has undoubtedly seen better days. There are other places to post events and invite friends now — notably, Facebook — and Upcoming has dwindled in popularity. There’s still a goldmine of great events on the site, though, especially if you live in a big city. Happening, a new Upcoming client for the iPhone, makes those events fun and easy to explore.

I had my doubts about the usefulness of Upcoming, but Happening’s use of geolocation made it easy to find events near me. It turns out that pub quiz hosts love Upcoming with a passion, and I happen to love pub quizzes. Result: one test run of Happening revealed something to do on every night of the week.

Location is what really takes Happening above and beyond the Upcoming web interface. When you’re out with your friends and having trouble deciding what to do, the web interface is little help. If you’ve got an iPhone on you, though, Happening delivers in two taps.

Version 1.1, which was just released on the App Store, offers the all-important option to add events to your Upcoming calendar. To be perfectly honest, though, I didn’t even have an Upcoming calendar until I had Happening.

Full Disclosure: Happening was created by one of our favorite Download Squad writers, Nik Fletcher.
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