Sarasota Joe

September 24, 2011 at 7:42pm

BusyCal rocks. It seems to solve all the problems of the new iCal and adds some great features I hadn't even thought of.

I downloaded the 30-day trial, and I'm fairly sure I'll cough up the $50 at the end of the month. SInce all the calendars remain on their original servers (MobilMe, GoogleMail, OnMyMac), if I don't like it, I can return to iCal at any time and my calendars will all be current.

I had already downloaded a hack to get rid of the faux leather skin, but that was far less a problem than the loss of groups. @brookwarmer, if you've got a better solution for this let me know. The loss of groups was a nightmare for me, since I have an enormous number of calendars. With BusyCal I can even group other people's shared Google Calendars into groups. This is absolutely great! And I am thrilled to have a non-modal info panel and calendar list back.

Since I have phone conferences with folks in other time zones, I find the time zone feature a nice touch, and the rtf notes are nice too. As a matter of fact, I've been playing with this for a few hours now, and I keep finding great new features. Monthly scrolling by week, so that the current week is always on top, and weekly scrolling by day are nice touches. The sharing features are simple and powerful, and it seems as though they put a lot of thought and care into this app.

Now all I need is an iPhone version, so I can have groups on my phone.

@chrisirwindavis, neither Google nor MobilMe support groups, so there is no way to synch them between devices. Setting up groups is a one time deal; every time you create a new calendar, all you have to do is remember to move it into the appropriate group on each device. Then for the rest of your life, it is all perfectly synched. Compared to iCal's complete lack of groups for synched calendars, it seems to me that if I would attribute the hyperbole "completely worthless" to anything, it would be better applied to iCal.