02-05-2021

Busycal Review

Busycal Review
Busycal Ios Review

Function: iCal Pro.

It oozes both care and class with every feature you see and after the critical success of BusyCal, BusyMac have another winner with BusyContacts. It’s not cheap, that’s for sure. Currently $49.99 on it’s own, although if you are a BusyCal customer you can get it for $29.99 (both together for $79.98 but I’m sure you can do that math).
Top reasons why people like BusyCal: 1. Smart Filters 2. Great support and development team 3. Integrated To Dos 4. Custom number of days/weeks 5.

Developer: BusyMac

Review: BusyCal When the folks at BusyMac showed BusyCal off at Macworld Expo, I was excited to see an iCal replacement. Unfortunately, at the time, it didn’t handle CalDAV and we were using CalDAV at work. With BusyCal, users get easy access to four different calendar views from the bottom tab bar: List, Day, Week, and Month. There is also a separate To Do view if you keep tasks and reminders in your.

Price: $40

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5. Universal.

Trial: Fully-featured (30 days)

A principled critic must be open-minded and amenable to being persuaded by data.Remembering Oscar Wilde’s admonition that experience is the name we give ourmistakes, I often find myself admitting error. When I first saw a digital photoframe, for example, I thought, “What a silly idea.” Then my wife’s niece gave usone for Christmas, and I realized it was revolutionary: other than for the rareframe that itself is a work of art, I now believe there is no reason to own aconventional photo frame. That is the appropriate preface to my assessment ofBusyCal. When I read about this software, I wondered why anyone would want tobuy a program that appeared to duplicate the functions of the free iCal program,more or less. But then I found myself in a situation where it was important tosync with Google Calendar, and in trying out BusyCal I learned it was superiorin virtually every respect.

The developers encourage users to see BusyCal as “iCal Pro.” It’s a gooddescription for what appears to be an elaboration of BusySync, an earlier piece of software from thesame company that allowed sharing of calendars over a LAN or syncing with GoogleCalendar. It has more features, and offers a high level of control over theinterface, compared with iCal.

Day in BusyCal

When you run BusyCal, you will find it looks almost exactly like iCal. Only anaficionado would be able to spot the differences. Porting your data to BusyCalrequires nothing more than launching it for the first time; additionally, youcan revert to iCal without losing anything except the custom features supportedby BusyCal.

Then you create a new event and instantly BusyCal shows how its designers haveresponded to users. You can edit the event immediately, without furtherkeystrokes, in either a floating window or a separate pane below the to-do liston the right. You also can edit more than the title: tabbing runs through theother fields. The fields that are displayed also can be customized. A user whotruly couldn’t stand iCal’s setup, which unlike its own earlier version requiresa separate command to enter the editing mode, might want to buy BusyCal just forthis convenience.

Event in BusyCal

In the latest update, BusyCal also allows the setting of a different defaultfont. Earlier versions already allowed customization of fonts, but the newuniversal font setting is terrific. It’s another single feature that mightpersuade some users, who have strong preferences about aesthetics.

As for Google Calendar, the sync works perfectly. It took me under a minute toset up everything. I was skeptical, so I ran multiple tests, checking the syncfunction with Google Calendar, MobileMe, and an iPhone. BusyCal will also syncover Bonjour and with BusyCal itself, on other machines.

There also are some minor features that distinguish BusyCal from iCal. It has anoption for displaying a three-day weather forecast and moon phases. There aresticky-notes and journal entries, and you can insert graphics. Events show whenthey were last edited and by whom; each iteration of a recurring event showswhich one it is in the sequence.

There also are subtle differences. Searches don’t work exactly as they do iniCal; the format is more and less powerful: more powerful because the resultscan be displayed by day, week, month, or list views, and in the last withvarious customization of columns; less powerful because you cannot specifysearches of events versus to-dos, titles versus notes, etc.

Week in iCal

A number of features are advertised, which I did not test. These includepassword protection of calendars. I use another program for to-dos, so I havenot cared if my calendar program does them. A cursory look at BusyCal suggeststhat its to-do function is sophisticated, with dated and undated options andrecurring items. BusyCal, unlike iCal, is not integrated with the remainder ofthe Mac OS X built-in suite. Thanks to the data detector function, iCal capturesevents from Apple Mail seamlessly. The workaround is to continue using thatcapability, because the items that are inserted into iCal appear in BusyCalalmost simultaneously.

There are only minor flaws. There is one glitch, though it might be myimagination. On BusyCal, it seems that events are bit more twitchy than in iCal,so that when you try to move them around they don’t seem to move as smoothly. Italso isn’t possible to drag all-day items downward to convert them into eventsat a specific time, or vice versa.

And there is a tiny discrepancy that may require an adjustment, if you use24-hour time settings, also known as “military time” (e.g., 18:00 for 6:00 PM).In iCal, clicking onto the space that is after noon and entering 9:00 createsthe event at 9:00, meaning 9:00 AM, but in BusyCal, doing that sometimes createsthe event at 21:00 (unless you further type “AM”). For example, say you have a“red-eye” flight from the West Coast to the East Coast, starting at 9:00 PM inSan Francisco and ending at 6:00 AM in Washington, D.C.; when you type 6:00 inthe field, it converts to 18:00; iCal assumes 6:00 is 6:00 AM and assumes youwill type 18:00 for 6:00 PM, which is how devotees of 24-hour time tend to useit in actual practice. The reference times listed on the left side of the mainwindow do not convert to a 24-hour format, but are fixed in a 12-hour format.

Although I am no programmer, playing around with BusyCal I infer that BusyCaland iCal are just the front-end user interfaces for the same databases.That must be why BusyCal works as well as it does, and it’s possible to go backand forth. Both programs are just presenting and allowing the editing of thesame basic files. Even if I’m wrong, it’s conceptually helpful in explaining howthings work.

Since I have a temporary need to track events in two time zones, I’ve just setBusyCal to one, iCal to the other. I’m running both, and with a launcher programit takes about a second to jump between them.

The only concern I would raise about BusyCal is a concern for the developers,not about them. Because it is so much better than iCal, it’s likely that Appleengineers will incorporate its features into their next iteration of their ownapplication. But until then, it’s easy to recommend switching to BusyCal.

@violasong and I have upgraded from iCal+BusySync to BusyCal. My review:

The good:

Scroll by Weeks. Traditional monthly calendar views suffer from the problem where less and less of your calendar view is useful as the month progresses. The worst-case comes on the last day of the month, where only ~1/30th of your month’s display is usefully editable.
Compounding the problem is having to page between two months when a work-week happens to span them to get a attempt to gain a coherent view of your week.
Scroll by Weeks turns your month view into a stacked-week view – each week is a row in an infinitely-vertically-scrolling table. This is kind of hard to explain, and unfortunately somewhat jarring to use (see my last Bad point, below) but means you’re not ambushed by stuff coming up the week after the end of the current month.
Carry forward uncompleted To Dos. My old Handspring Visor Deluxe came with an app called “Datebook+”, which I later learned was a lightweight version of Pimlico’s DateBk 3.
The best features of Datebook+ were its event-entry interface (which blows away my iPhone 3GS’s awkward seven-tap-minimum event-entry-workflow), its week-view (something I wish my iPhone could do whatsoever) and floating events.
Floating events were events you could assign to a specific time, but were also like to-do items that could be marked as completed. If you didn’t mark them as done, they’d carry-forward to the next day until they were marked as completed or deleted altogether.
I loved floating events since they allowed me to schedule uncritical tasks in the future, ensuring I wouldn’t forget about them while keeping them off my radar until relevant.
BusyCal implements this feature, but I haven’t really tried it yet. Long ago I gave up on calendaring software authors understanding the beauty+utility of floating events, so I restructured my life to cope without them.
I want to fall in love again, but I’m scared I might get hurt.
Inspector split view. BusyCal has an option of displaying and editing event info in built-into-the-main-window split view, a la iCal 1’s drawer (but more modern). Avoids the annoying pop-up window that obscures calendar content and annoying double-click-event-then-click-edit-button-then-click-field workflow.
Simple text box for entering times. You can actually type out “4:23p” into a new event’s start time instead of navigating iCal’s awkward segregated time field.
Remove Alarms, Attachments and To Do Items from subscribed Calendars. Previously my alarms would ring on Victoria’s iCal and iPhone. I think I discovered a way to suppress this, but I’m unsure and unwilling to go back just to verify.
Animation. Moving from month to month is animated with a simple but effective slide effect.
Alarm Window. Does away with iCal’s annoying ringing-alarm animation, and allows fine-tuning of snooze duration.

Busycal Review

The bad:

Busycal Ios Review

Need to keep BusyCal running to stay in sync. Adds to my Dock pollution. BusySync used to work in the background. BusyMac support says “We’re well aware of the demand for that feature and hope to provide it in the future.”
Uglier than iCal. BusyMac diverged cosmetically from iCal in a few ways, all bad. iCal uses a 12pt Helvetica while BusyCal uses an awkward and attention-stealing 14pt Lucinda Grande. Weekend days (Saturday+Sunday) have an unnecessary light-gray background and for-the-love-of-god red month day numbers. Red!
Instead of iCal’s simple, elegant inverted-roundrect denoting all-day events, BusyMac attempts an unnecessarily visually-complex shiny-bubble look whose multiple elements adds even more distraction from understanding the data at hand.
SSL is off by default. BusyCal offers SSL encryption for local syncing, but for some inexplicable reason they don’t turn it on for you automatically.
Scroll by Weeks delimiters. While I appreciate the functionality of Scroll by Weeks, BusyCal doesn’t do a good job denoting when one month ends and another begins. They do so textually (the last day of Dec reads “30” and the next day reads “Jan 1”), however their UI is noisy enough that the text gets lost. Here, I think a green-bar effect could be tweaked to become useful yet subtle.
Scroll by Weeks animation. While the month view is nicely animated, Scroll by Weeks is not. This is unfortunate, since Scroll by Weeks mental model is less familiar than the traditional month view, and would greatly benefit from an animated up-and-down slide effect.
Indeed, I couldn’t understand the Scroll by Weeks feature at all at first due to its jarring transition (even your currently-selected-day is lost).