BusyCal: Calendar & Tasks

My spouse has Parkinson’s. It is imperative that all meetings, outings & every other occurrences on both of our iPhones, iPads & MacBooks sync perfectly. We have been using the ‘Busy’ software since the beginning. Not only is the software stable, the people who run it are always there for support in a calm and friendly manner even when the answer is not what I had hoped for. Though it can be accessed by & from the three hardware devices I find it best to choose one MacBook as central station using the others for reference & to make quick changes on the fly. The other use for the non-central devices, especially the iPhones, is to take notes on an appointment when developing it, then take the time to fully describe it when at home. The full description is important especially when you consider that when ever you think you will remember what a short-hand will mean later… you won’t.

First, my complaint. GCal allows individual events to be colored differently, overriding the default calendar color. This is hugely helpful for color coding different projects. BusyCal doesn’t have this feature, which I wish it did. However, there is a work-around on the desktop app, which allows tags on events that change the color. This is how I color-code my calendar without having to have a dozen separate calendars just to show different colors for different classes, for example. It’s also easier to switch events to different colors this way, and I can even make a tag to color a single event that needs to stand out, which would be obnoxious if I had to make a new calendar for that. I highly recommend the desktop app, HOWEVER, these tags colors don’t sync to the mobile app! The tag shows but they’re all the same color and I can’t edit it. I can’t even add my existing tags to events in the app because my list of tags also doesn’t sync. This makes my calendar impossible to organize on my phone, which is where ease of use is most important to me since I can’t pull out my laptop when I’m walking and need to quickly check which class I have next. I really hope the next update fixes this because it feels like a basic feature that the mobile and desktop apps should have in common. —————— the positive —————— This app is a huge upgrade from the native apple calendar or gcal apps. Having to-dos and other reminders appear in the calendar is something I never knew I needed. The list view combines events and reminders for the day in a quick view way that is super helpful for reviewing my day/week first thing in the morning without scrolling through my calendar. GCal doesn’t sync non-google calendars and doesn’t connect to my reminders app on my phone.

I really like it’s format and integration of tasks and calendar. I like it’s flexibility to work with multiple different types of accounts. I wish it would work with the latest iOS reminders better. I was really disappointed when the first iOS upgrade of reminders broke part of how I was using busycal. If it weren’t for that I would give it five stars for iOS and 4.5 stars for the desktop version. If it had the ability to show tasks on the date originally scheduled, but all overdue tasks in the task list bar on the right, and option two complete tasks on yesterday instead of today or the date originally scheduled, I could give the desktop five stars. I wish it had all of the features of goodtask, or synchronized with reminders in a way that would not undo the awesome BusyCal regenerate feature when also synchronizing with goodtask. I wish my chronify Integration could synchronize to a task list instead of a calendar.