BusyBlog

BusyCal and the new MobileMe Calendar beta

Apple recently announced a new MobileMe Calendar beta that offers an improved interface and enables calendar sharing with other MobileMe users.

The MobileMe Calendar beta functions as a cloud-based CalDAV server, similar to the iCal Server included in Snow Leopard Server. Calendars on your Mac are now synced with MobileMe via CalDAV. Previously, calendars on your Mac were synced with MobileMe through Sync Services.

We think this is a good move on Apple's part. Sync Services is very fragile, and the sooner Apple can move away from it the better. Syncing with MobileMe via CalDAV is a step in the right direction and should make MobileMe syncing more reliable and extensible. That's the good news.

The bad news is that BusyCal does not currently support CalDAV and the MobileMe CalDAV calendars will appear read-only in BusyCal. Therefore, BusyCal users should NOT use the MobileMe Calendar beta at this time.

We are working on CalDAV support in BusyCal and expect to release a public beta that is compatible with the MobileMe calendar beta later this summer. If you are a BusyCal user, please wait until the BusyCal public beta is available before using the MobileMe Calendar beta. You can be notified of its availability by signing up here:

http://www.busymac.com/beta.html

If you are already using the MobileMe calendar beta, you have two options:

1) Use the new MobileMe Calendar beta with iCal. Your MobileMe calendars will be read-only in BusyCal.

If you want to continue using the MobileMe Calendar beta, you'll have to use iCal for editing events on your MobileMe calendars. The MobileMe calendars will appear read-only in BusyCal. You can continuing using BusyCal to edit shared calendars on the LAN and on Google.

or

2) Switch back to the old MobileMe Calendar and continue using BusyCal.

If you want to switch back to the old MobileMe Calendar, which is compatible with BusyCal, you can do so by clicking the following link:

http://www.me.com/calendar/downgrade/

BusyCal 1.3 released

BusyCal 1.3 has been released! This version includes many new features and bug fixes, and is localized into several languages. Here's a summary of the new features:

• Localization — Localized into French, German, Italian and Dutch. Other languages are in the works.
• Week Numbers — Option to display ISO 8601 week numbers in the calendar and mini months.
• Birthdays calendar — BusyCal now has its own Birthdays calendar that syncs directly with Address Book. And you can optionally display a person's age in the event title (e.g. John's 39th Birthday).
• Address Book integration — You can drag People and Groups from Address Book (or the new Address Panel) into the calendar to create a meeting, or drag them into the To Do List to create a To Do that is linked back to that contact in Address Book.
• Drag & Drop improvements — You can drag To Dos into the calendar to transform them into Events or drag Events from the calendar into the To Do List to transform them into To Dos. And the week view now supports drag & drop to and from the timeline to convert all-day events to timed-events, and vice versa.
• Apple Help — Help files are now available from the help menu.

BusyCal users can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu. New users can download it from http://www.busymac.com/download/BusyCal.zip

That was then, this is now

With the recent demise of Now Software, it seemed appropriate to republish this blog post. This post was originally published before BusyCal was announced. It explains how to run a script that converts all of your Now Up-to-Date (NUD) calendar data to iCal. 

Since iCal syncs with BusyCal via Sync Services, once the NUD calendar data has been transferred to iCal, it will instantly sync to BusyCal as well. NUD users should be very comfortable using BusyCal. It provides many of the calendar sharing and personal productivity features NUD users have come to rely on, while maintaining compatibility with iCal, MobileMe, and the iPhone. 

NUD users are welcome to run this free script to transfer their data to iCal, whether or not they plan to use BusyCal. Once the data is transferred to iCal, you may download a 30-day trial of BusyCal and test it out. If you later decide not to use BusyCal, just stop using it and return to iCal, and all of your data will be current in iCal.

Following is the original blog post.

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Migrating from Now Up-to-Date to iCal

Back in the day, Now Up-to-Date (NUD) was the undisputed champion of calendar sharing for Mac users. We know, we're the original developers. But it's getting a little long in the tooth, and doesn't sync with the iPhone, so many NUD users are migrating to BusyCal. But how do you transfer all those events in NUD to iCal?

NUD to iCal is a free utility that copies events from Now Up-to-Date to iCal. It will create a new calendar in iCal for each category in NUD and copy all events to it. Events in NUD are converted to the following event types in iCal:

NUD	iCal
Appointment	Event
Banner Special Holiday	All Day Event
To-Do Call Undated	ToDo
Sticky Note Graphic	NA

How to use NUD to iCal
Launch NUD to iCal and select the following options:

• Source calendar — You may copy events from all calendars (categories) in NUD, or a single calendar.
• Date — All events after the date specified will be copied to iCal.

It is recommended that you set a short date range, like one year, and NOT import 10+ years of events from NUD to iCal, as it will take a long time (many hours) to process and iCal will run very slowly if you add that many events to it.

When you click Start, a new calendar will be created in iCal for each source calendar (category) in NUD, and all events that occur after the date specified will be copied to iCal. The progress will be displayed on the bottom of the window while the events are being imported.

Processing can take a while depending on the size of your calendar. Make sure you allow plenty of time for processing to complete and do not use or quit NUD or iCal while NUD to iCal is running. You may click the Stop button at any time to stop processing.

An alert will be displayed once processing is complete, informing you how many events were imported and to reconfigure the repeating events in iCal.

 

Note: NUD stores repeating events as a series of individual events, whereas iCal stores repeating events as a single event with a recurrence rule. Therefore, repeating events in NUD are not copied to iCal. Instead, only the first occurrence of a repeating event in NUD is copied to iCal and the word "[REPEATING]" is appended to the event title so you can easily find these events in iCal and reconfigure the repeat interval.

You may search for the repeating events in iCal by entering "repeating" in the search field in the upper-right hand corner of iCal.

A list of the matching events will appear on the bottom of the window.

 

You may then double-click each one, and reconfigure the repeat interval and edit the event title, as appropriate.

 

And that's it. All of your events in NUD have been copied to iCal.

Download NUD to iCal

Macworld Expo recap

Macworld Expo 2010 is behind us now and it was a resounding success!

Many people predicted this would be the end of Macworld Expo since Apple and many other large vendors had pulled out, so we were expecting the worst. The entire show was held in the North Hall of Moscone center, which in the past was reserved for smaller vendors and affectionately referred to as Tiny Town. So, we setup our little kiosk and wondered "will anyone show up?"

Well, the Mac faithful weren't deterred by Apple's absence and they showed up in droves. And since all the vendors were crammed into the North Hall, it made for a very crowded and exhilarating atmosphere. We met with thousands of new and existing customers and gave non-stop demos.

In addition to meeting with customers, we met with many members of the press and did video interviews with Chuck Joiner and the irrepressible Merlin Mann.

And last but not least, BusyCal won a Mac Observer Editors Choice Award! It was great show and we're looking forward to doing it again next year!

BusyCal 1.2 released

BusyCal 1.2 has been released! This version adds two commonly requested features — a global font size preference, and Calendar Groups — and fixes several bugs. Here's a brief list of changes:

• New global font size preference
• New Calendar Groups feature
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed several google syncing bugs
• Fixed row highlighting bug in List View
• Fixed other miscellaneous bugs

BusyCal users can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu. New users can download it from http://www.busymac.com/download/BusyCal.dmg.

BusyCal awarded MacLife Editors' Choice

 MacLife recently reviewed BusyCal and awarded it an Editors' Choice!

Here's what MacLife had to say:

BusyCal does almost everything iCal does and adds some crucial missing features. In a few short weeks, it's become our default calendar application.

Frankly, BusyCal is such a vast improvement over iCal that we can't imagine switching back.

And in a related article MacLife went on to say:

Imagine iCal on steroids, then imagine that steroidal iCal on a second helping of steroids, and you start to get an idea. BusyMac brings with it so many improvements over the basic calendar, you'll soon wonder why you didn't switch earlier then later wonder what you'd ever done without BusyCal.

Thank you, MacLife, for recognizing the many great features of BusyCal.

Visit us at Macworld Expo

BusyMac will be exhibiting at Macworld Expo, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Feb. 11-13 2010.

Macworld provides a rare opportunity for us to meet face-to-face with our customers, demo the product, and find out what you'd like to see from us in the future.

If you're planning to attend Macworld Expo, please stop by and say hello. And if you haven't registered yet, you can get a free exhibit hall pass by clicking the following link:

http://rcsreg.com/macworld/SBIP4120

We hope to see you there!

BusyCal wins Macworld Eddy Award!

Each year Macworld picks the best Mac software products of the year and honors them with Eddy Awards. Last year they picked BusySync, and this year they picked BusyCal!

Here's what Macworld had to say:

"BusyCal looks a lot like iCal. But it does things iCal can only dream of. It seamlessly syncs with Google Calendar out of the box, shares calendars via Bonjour, and supports multi-person editing. BusyCal did more than revive the calendaring category; it established itself as the category leader."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. We're really honored to be recognized by Macworld for all the hard work that went into BusyCal 1.0. And we're grateful for the encouragement and feedback we've received from our customers. 

Stay tuned. We're not done yet...

BusyCal 1.1

BusyCal 1.1 has been released! We added several features including the commonly requested mini-month navigator, 64-bit and Garbage Collection support on Snow Leopard, three-finger swiping, and more.

Here's a complete list of changes:

• Added mini-month calendar to source list.
• Support for three-finger swiping.
• Added Duration column to List View.
• Added an "at start" alarm interval.
• Support for 64-bit and Garbage Collection on Snow Leopard.
• Admin password no longer required to update Dock icon, except during a software update.
• Support both shift-return and option-return for line feeds.
• Clear stale data in info panel when an event moves out of view.
• Better memory management when syncing with Entourage.
• Better handling of malformed ics files.
• Better date handling when scheduling events with no year.
• Better handling of 4-digit year input.
• Fixed bug affecting recurring events starting prior to 1930
• Hide info panel when app is minimized.
• Fixed preference setting for default calendar app.
• Various recurring event bug fixes.
• Option to display more descriptive time zone names.
• Backups filenames are stored in yyyy-mm-dd format.
• Fixed various Google syncing bugs.
• Fixed crash caused by unicode non-breaking space characters.
• Fixed crash caused by corrupted system font.
• Improved logging.

Existing BusyCal users can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu. New users can download it from http://www.busymac.com/download/BusyCal.dmg

BusyCal 1.0.1 released

BusyCal 1.0.1 has been released. This is a bug fix release and contains the following changes:

• Dock icon updates properly to show today's date
• Alarms can be added to events on the Birthdays calendar
• Info panel description field scrolls properly when entering lots of text
• Text in read-only notes field can be selected/copied
• URLs are clickable in read-only notes field
• Follow event to its new date when changing date in info panel
• Faster launching
• Fixed Undo crash
• Fixed Delete Duplicates crash
• Fixed Sticky Notes editing crash
• Recover from failed BusySync database upgrades
• Don't allow multiple Google Connections for the same account
• Fixed Google permission errors
• Fixed malformed Google meeting requests
• Fixed malformed Google degenerate recurrences
• Don't allow Organizer to add self as attendee
• Import non-UTF-8 ics files
• Process meeting replies that don't match original recipient's name or email
• Fixed custom weekly repeat bug
• Fixed end time recurrence exception bug
• Fixed Auckland, New Zealand time zone bugs
• Fixed To Do sorting in calendar
• Completed To Dos can be dragged to original due date

Existing BusyCal users can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu. New users can download it from http://www.busymac.com/download/BusyCal.dmg