Review: BusyCal 2.0 remains superior to Apple's Calendar
If you rely on your calendar app to keep yourself focused and productive, you’ll quickly run into the limitations of Apple’s Calendar (known before its Mountain Lion incarnation as iCal). Many individuals and workgroups who need to share calendars turn to BusyMac’s BusyCal. Sporting a face-lift and a slew of welcome new features, BusyCal 2 will be a worthwhile upgrade for most users, but will require workflow changes for some people. And if your organization is dependent on Microsoft Exchange, BusyCal is not, for now, an appropriate choice.
Syncing and sharing events and tasks
BusyCal 2 requires Mountain Lion (although it still supports BusyCal 1.6 clients running on previous versions of OS X). It supports Notification Center, synchronizing and sharing calendars between two or more people using the standard CalDAV protocol. The most common CalDAV services are iCloud and Google Calendar, but BusyCal works with many other CalDAV implementations; the program can also synchronize directly with other copies of BusyCal on a LAN. Unlike Apple’s Calendar, which split tasks (called "To Dos" in BusyCal) into the new Reminders app, BusyCal integrates events and To Dos into one program. BusyCal continues to boast superior features over Apple’s programs for event and task creation and management, especially those that repeat. Entries you make in BusyCal are immediately pushed to the CalDAV server.
Show Me, Tell Me Clearly: The new menu-bar app shows you today’s weather, lists upcoming event details, and lets you enter new events in natural language.
No iOS version of BusyCal exists, but any changes you make in any iOS calendar or task-management app (including the company’s own BusyToDo) that sync to iCloud will automatically sync to BusyCal. Google Calendar doesn’t support syncing of To Dos. BusyCal 2 drops support for Apple’s deprecated Sync Services system framework, so it no longer synchronizes with iOS devices via iTunes.
BusyCal adds a new Quick Entry companion app that lives in your menu bar so that it’s always available; it provides a small window with today’s weather, upcoming events, and a text-entry field that accepts natural-language event details such as “Dinner with Dori next Tues at 6.” Pressing Return creates the event (or To Do) in BusyCal and opens the item’s Info window for further details. This entry-from-the-menu-bar feature was popularized by Flexibits’ $20 Fantastical; it’s worth noting, though, that BusyCal’s natural-language implementation isn’t as smart and flexible as Fantastical's approach.
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