Anyone using BusyCal?

Is your Mac calendar account not the owner of the meeting? If it’s not, you won’t be able to edit the event.

this is a bit counter intuitive. I was able to create the event on the calendar but not able to edit?

What I am asking is if you have two different calendar accounts in play. For example, fuzzygel@gmail.com versus fuzzygel@iCloud.com. If you’re using two different accounts, only the account that created the event can edit. If you’re only using one account, then the issue I mentioned wouldn’t apply to you. :slight_smile:

I understand what you mean. This is the process I ran through. I created a new event by quick add in the app. It successfully added the event to my default calender. I can see that. Later I had the zoom details that I want to add to the event but I could not find a way to do that on the Mac. I presume that Busycal had the required access to create the event then it would enable me to edit after it was created.

Yeah, I agree. You should be good with BusyCal. Something else is going on.

Busycal relies on iCloud for sync. It remains in sync with the Calendar app as well, which means you need to turn notifications off for Calendar. Calendar still comes up when I import an ics file.

One of the nice things is that BusyContacts can maintain a history of calendar items for contacts. It does not have features for sharing holes for scheduling with others, but they may come in the next version.

Of course, versioning means that the “one-time fee” becomes a “rinse and repeat” situation after a year or two.

You can change this if you want. Here.

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I love BusyCal and have used it for many years. I periodically try out competitors such as Fantastical and the stock Calendar app, but come back to BusyCal every time. I use it as a front end for my work Office365 and personal Google calendars and it handles both flawlessly. Appearance is a bit utilitarian compared to the other options, but as mentioned above it’s extremely powerful with Smart Filters and a wide range of options for customizable fields for events.

I have been using Reminders as a to do list and my favorite feature of BusyCal is the option to have a right-side pane with Reminders entries. So the application has really become my main dashboard for managing tasks and appointments. Fantastical does something similar, but data entry is much easier in BusyCal. For example, to schedule a task, I select a day, press command-K and a new reminder is created with pull down menus for Reminder lists, due dates/times, and a complete set of options for repeating tasks. I rarely open the Reminders app at all.

BusyCal also has a fairly good companion iOS app. All fields are synced reliably and access to event and task data are quick to access. Again, it doesn’t look as nice as Fantastical, but overall better than other choices, IMO.

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Could you take a screen Grab of where I might find this option in Settings?
Thanks!

I don’t need a new calendar app but for that price I’m trying it :joy:

I have a ridiculous problem with iCal that even when all calendars are “unticked”, and in particular the calendar in question is unticked, it is still showing it in the view. I have no idea how to stop it and it’s maddening.

View menu, “Show Tasks”, about 2/3 of the way down

:clap: Thanks for the reply!

I bought BusyCal yesterday and already I think it’s great. It fixed the daft problem I had with iCal showing a calendar that wasn’t selected, but since that’s an error it’s not really fair to judge iCal on those grounds. Bonuses for me from 30 mins of tinkering in settings:

  • Weather forecast in your calendar!! Yes please!! (Shout out to UK folk having to allow an extra 20 mins to de-ice their cars before going anywhere this week.)

  • Choosing what the red badge count on the app icon actually counts! I dithered about showing number of items left in my day, but for now I’ve set it to show number of new invites like iCal.

  • That little box on the left hand side that shows the full month! If you drag it up you can see 2 months at once :exploding_head: I no longer have to count on my fingers what the date might be when I’m heading into the next month!! (Of course I could’ve just switched to the next view in iCal, but that means changing apps as I leave my calendar in the background, and honestly it was just easier to count on my fingers! BEFORE NOW!!)

I’ve never set up meetings via iCal, I always did it through browser in GCal, which was annoying (for that reason I tended to batch do it when I had a few that needed booking). I’ve been nervous about what my colleagues would actually receive. However I see BusyCal has a Zoom integration and you can set a default meeting time, so I think I will give it a go sometime and see how it works.

I don’t quite have my meeting alerts set up right (they weren’t sounding yesterday for some reason) so at the moment I do have iCal reminding me about meetings, but I will hopefully fix this today or tomorrow.

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I’m having a slight issue with Busycal showing calendars that I’ve toggled to ‘off’ it seems to just show them anyway if I switch away from the app and come back.

In the screenshot my work calendars are set to not show, but they are showing up anyway (Blue appointments)

Hmmm in your screengrab on the left “Nomad Foods > Calendar” is ticked for viewing (the white tick box in the blue circle). This is the problem I’m having in iCal though. Yesterday before I installed BusyCal, I unticked ALL calendars in iCal and my calendar still wasn’t blank. So frustrating!

It probably wouldn’t even matter so much if it wasn’t my team’s calendar that was the one that’s stuck - I really don’t need to know who has the day off, every minute of every day :rofl:

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I thought the toggle to the left of ‘Nomad Foods’ was the visible/invisible switch? Blue position to show the set, orange to hide it?

Hmm you’re right, sorry, I hadn’t noticed that toggle (it’s actually slightly offscreen in my window like it is in yours too!).

When I toggle my collection to off/orange, all the calendars in that collection disappear from view, so I assume that’s what’s meant to happen and that for some reason it’s not working for you.

If you open the right side drawer, there’s also a pull down menu in between the drawer button and the search bar that allows you to Show Tasks, Show Info Panel, or Show Both. Easy to find if you’re looking for it.

BusyCal uses iCloud to sync. I use it and Fantastical. Any time I’m using the calendar on my computer, it’s via BusyCal. I love the interface way better than the Mac calendar. Fantastical lives in my toolbar and I will glance at it throughout the day, but that’s the extent of it’s use on my Mac.

I use Fantastical as my calendar on iOS devices. I also use the widget to view my calendar items on my phone. When entering an event or item from iOS, I find it a lot nicer to work through Fantastical.

I have BusyCal on my iOS devices, but don’t use it much on them. Granted, it’s been a while, but it just wasn’t a smooth process to use them on my iOS devices… didn’t render as nice, was clunky, and always had problems syncing it with one server or another.

The reason I went to BusyCal over the stock calendar was because it allowed for much easier coordination of calendars across devices and calendar types. I use mostly Apple services at home, but have to share out some calendar items on a couple of Google calendars, and my job uses Outlook, with which BusyCal works well.

Also, I have a shared calendar with my family, and I’ve found that when I duplicate items on my work calendar, I can “switch” the calendar (ie if I have a meeting at work, I can duplicate the calendar item and switch it from work to the Fam calendar so they can see what I’m doing at a given time) and if I do that on BusyCal, it doesn’t send a notice to everyone else attending that I’m doing something with the event. When I tried that (in the past) using the Mac calendar, any time I duplicated an event to add to my Fam cal, it notified EVERYONE attending that I was doing something to the meeting. That got messy quick.

Long and short, I like both calendar apps and use them both for different reasons.

If you don’t want to pay for BusyCal independently, check SetApp to see if there is enough there to justify a subscription. I found that to be my answer - I subscribe to SetApp and have a few features that I regularly use that more than justify the cost. And I can try all their apps whenever I feel like it, even if I don’t always keep them.

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thx. Should have thought of that. Now I have Hazel opening ics files and then deleting them.