Calendar platform Sunrise just introduced third-party apps for your calendar. Starting with Evernote, GitHub, Songkick, TripIt and Asana, you can now connect your accounts to Sunrise to see your relevant data directly in your calendar, and interact with it.

“Now that we are available on three different platforms — iOS, Android and the web — our goal is to automatically retrieve as much future information as possible,” co-founder and CEO Pierre Valade told me in a phone interview. “We started with five apps to show the different use cases, but we are going to bring even more apps to Sunrise — we essentially want to bring everything that works in your calendar.”

With the TripIt integration, you can see your future flights in your calendar without having to manually add this info. There are many travel apps that try to work around this cumbersome manual process. For example, Capitaine Train sends you an invitation to add your train route to your calendar. But it’s still not as seamless as Sunrise’s integration with TripIt.

We started with five apps to show the different use cases, but we are going to bring even more apps to Sunrise. Pierre Valade

With Songkick, you can track artists to see when they are playing in your city. Now, you get concert suggestions directly in your calendar. This way, you can see if there is a conflict in your calendar, or if you are free and don’t know what to do. We can imagine integrations with other recommendation apps for movies or sports events.

The GitHub integration shows your milestones in your calendar. Other productivity apps, such as Asana or Evernote, can show you tasks with due dates. Sunrise already supports Producteev as well.

And this is where Sunrise is more than a simple calendar feed that you add to your calendar. With Evernote for example, you can actually edit your notes in Sunrise or change the due date. It syncs both ways so that the information is always up to date in both apps.

If you need more granular control, you can open the note in the app. With deep linking, it will directly automatically open this particular note in the app. It works the same way with GitHub and Asana.

These apps are just a few examples of what’s possible in Sunrise — they are all available on iOS, Android and the web. Now, it’s clear that the company doesn’t simply want to create a better calendar. Sunrise is building a calendar platform with as much information as possible. As long as something is tied to a date, Sunrise is able to display this information.

These are all custom integrations that allow you to interact with this data. It will make your calendar more useful than the place where you gather your work meetings. And it could be a great differentiating factor against the default calendar apps on your phone.

Coming with today’s update, there is also a brand new date picker. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks now. It works well and is much more efficient than the previous date picker.

Now, you will get a preview preview propup of your day to set a time for your event. You can adjust the length of your event by simply dragging the bottom of the event block. It’s very visual and much more compelling than having to scroll through hours and minutes.

Refinements like this one go into the same direction as the new apps for Sunrise. Streamlining the date picking process can save you a few minutes here and there. With the new third-party app integrations, if you don’t have to dig for information in other apps, it should make your calendar more efficient as well.

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