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BusyCal adds long-anticipated Exchange compatibility
It's a big day for Exchange users; one of the best Mac calendar applications, BusyCal, has just been updated to support Microsoft's enterprise collaboration technology. Version 2.5 is available in the Mac App Store now, as a free upgrade for existing users or US$29.99 for new licensees. The new version supports Office 365, full sharing privileges, public calendars, free / busy time, tasks and more. Of course, the new build is still compatible with both iCloud and Google Calendar hosted scheduling. Mac users who work with Microsoft Exchange calendars may sometimes feel like they just have to make the best of a challenging situation. Microsoft's own Office client, Outlook 2011, works well, but doesn't necessarily deliver that "born on Mac" experience we crave; Apple's Calendar (formerly iCal) may feel right, but compatibility hiccups can drag down your calendar productivity. Even the popular Fantastical app relies on one of those full-featured calendars for syncing. Back in the day, the original BusyCal application (up through version 1.6) worked with Sync Services and iCal / Calendar to deliver Exchange functionality to happy users. Unfortunately, as Apple's underlying synchronization technology was deprecated (not to mention being creaky and buggy for quite a while), BusyMac founders John Chaffee and Dave Riggle made the tough choice in BusyCal 2 to abandon Sync Services and restructure the app around the supportable cloud calendaring technologies. A number of features had to be left on the editing floor in that change, including publishing calendars local-to-Google and crossover LAN sync with cloud calendars. (I was personally irked about that shift, as I was apparently one of a small number of BusyCal 1.x customers successfully using the product to replicate my work Exchange calendar to a Google calendar so that my spouse would be able to track my comings and goings.) Chaffee and Riggle have been working on Mac calendar apps for a long time; they were behind the remarkably capable Now Up-to-Date networked scheduling app that debuted on Mac OS 7 in the early 1990s. It's great to see their current product still evolving and responding to the needs of the Mac community. You can read more about BusyCal, and get a full rundown of using the app for sharing and collaboration, in the free BusyCal Take Control e-book by Joe Kissel.
BusyCal 2 adds new views, menu bar quick entry, gives up Sync Services
It was already among the leading Calendar/iCal replacement apps for productivity aficionados, and now BusyCal has received a boost of new functionality with the release of BusyCal 2. The update includes improved iCloud functionality, and is also compatible with Google Calendar and other services based on the CalDAV standard. It requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion; users of Leopard and Snow Leopard can still use BusyCal 1.6 to sync over the local network with 2.0 users. BusyCal 2 adds natural language support for event entry, a live 10-day weather forecast and even a new heat map view that gives you a glimpse at how busy the next 12 months will be. The updated app also works hand in hand with new Mountain Lion features like Notification Center for updates and alerts. A new menu bar applet (similar to Fantastical and Today) lets you browse the day's events without opening the full BusyCal application, and you can also use it to create new events and to-do reminders. In addition to the cloud service calendar access it offers, BusyCal retains its popular ability to sync calendars between instances of the app running on different Macs on the same LAN... with a caveat or two. Users of BusyCal 1.6 should note that there are several functional changes from 1.6 to 2.0. As Apple's Sync Services framework is deprecated in Mountain Lion, features in BusyCal that leveraged it (crossover synchronization with iCal/Calendar, Outlook or Entourage; direct calendar sync via iTunes to iOS devices) are no longer available. Since BusyCal 2.0 doesn't sync with calendar apps that support Exchange, the BC 1.x "hack" that allowed Outlook users to replicate their work calendars onto Google Calendar isn't possible in the new version. In fact, BusyCal 2 doesn't publish calendars to Google at all; they need to be created on the web side, then you can subscribe to them in the app. Another consequence of the rebuild is that LAN-shared calendars (not iCloud or Google hosted calendars) cannot be synced to iTunes devices or published to the cloud services; they are local network only. BusyCal 2 carries over the same clean, accessible aesthetic of its predecessor, letting you view the upcoming days, weeks, months or even years without being overwhelmed. The app is available for US$29.99 via the App Store, but you can take it for a free 30-day test drive via the official website.
Fantastical 1.0.2 for Mac supports BusyCal
While I read our review of Fantastical with much enthusiasm, as a longtime BusyCal user I simply couldn't afford to play dice with my calendar. But Fantastical 1.0.2 is now available, and the primary update appears to be that the natural-language calendar tool now plays nice with BusyCal. You can get Fantastical from Flexibits directly or on the Mac App Store.
The best Mac applications I used in 2010
As the end of 2010 approaches, I started looking back over the Mac applications that I used this year to see which ones stood out. They weren't necessarily released this year (although many were), but they were apps that helped me get stuff done in 2010. I didn't try to come up with some specific number or any other predefined criteria, I just took a good hard look at my Applications folder, menu bar and System Preferences. They are presented in no particular order. Dropbox reached 1.0 in 2010, and the milestone release included some significant Mac-specific features such as Extended Attribute Sync. This was also the first year that I exceeded the free space Dropbox provides, and paid for a 50 GB account. Thanks to the referral program, educational user referral bonus, and extra free space programs that Dropbox offers, I have 83.4 GB of space in my "50 GB" account. TUAW folks have written extensively about our love of Dropbox, but if you've somehow missed it: Dropbox is a folder on your computer which syncs (and therefore is "backed up" and version-managed) online, and which you can then sync to all of your other Mac, Windows, or Linux computers. (Want to know more? Check out the official Dropbox tour.) Thanks to the API which the company announced back in May, many iOS developers have added Dropbox syncing as well, making 2010 a pretty significant year for Dropbox and its users. (Cost: 2 GB/free; $9.99/month or $99.00/year for 50 GB; or $19.99/month or $199.00/year for 100 GB.) Read on for the rest of 2010's best Mac apps...
BusyCal Info Panel Preferences give you more event options
BusyCal is what iCal should have been. It continues to impress me the longer I use it, and recently I found a way to customize it that I did not know about previously. Event details, like the one shown in the image here, can be customized from a much larger list than what BusyCal shows you by default. To access the Info Panel Preferences, click the small white "i" at the top right of the Event Info panel. (See item #1 in the image here. Note that you can only access these when the panel is floating on its own, not from the BusyCal sidebar.) There are 18 different fields that you can use, and most of them are self explanatory (you can see an image in the gallery below), but I want to draw your attention to a few that I find very helpful. The first is "my URL" which gives you an easy way to link an event to a person from your address book. Simply drag the name from the address book to the my URL field and a link will be created (see #2 in image). Clicking that link will open their contact information in the Address Book.app. You can also drag a person (or business) to the Location, Attendees, My Notes, or Notes field. For the latter two, you get more than just a link to their name, you get address and phone number information (see item #3 in image). While you could use "Attendees" for the same purpose (and that field is shown by default), when you do that, BusyCal wants to know if you want to "invite" them or send them changes whenever you edit the event. That isn't a feature I ever use, so I didn't want to use Attendees, but my URL is almost perfect.
Marketcircle gives orphaned NUDC users some love
A well-known software vendor is rushing in to help out Mac users who have become "orphaned" by the recent failure of Now Software. Marketcircle, developers of Daylite, have set up a web page on their site to help out existing users of Now Up-to-Date and Contact (NUDC) who may be looking for a new solution. The page starts off by noting that Daylite may not be the perfect solution for some NUDC users, and then details the similarities and differences between the applications. There are even instructions on how to customize Daylite to make it more familiar looking to NUDC users, and hints on how to make the migration between the two applications. To help ease the pain of moving to a new platform, Marketcircle is also offering a 30% discount on Daylite to former Now Software customers who are going to need a new application. Details on how to take advantage of the Daylite discount can be found here. Of course, Daylite isn't the only solution that former NUDC customers can move to; the original developers of Now Up-to-Date are the brains behind BusyCal and BusySync, and they have just reprinted a blog post about how to migrate your NUD information to iCal so that it can be used with the products of BusyMac software.
Ask TUAW: Clocks, screen guards, MacBook hard drive replacement, NFS automount, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about replacing a MacBook hard drive, refreshing a NFS mount, getting a simple clock on screen, improving iCal's note handling, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
Ask TUAW: Joystick as mouse, remote access, PC friendly zip files, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about using a joystick as a mouse, remotely accessing a Mac from a PC, creating zip files without the Mac-specific metadata, replicating certain Windows features, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine and which version of Mac OS X you're running (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.
Mac power tools: charge up your workflow
I recently bought a new Mac, and I decided not to migrate years of cruft over to a pristine Snow Leopard install. I also decided to shed years of stale workflow and adopt a new way of doing things. Enter the power tools: software that augments the power and performance of OS X to do things faster and smarter. I'll examine some general system enhancements and look at a couple of powerful Mac/iPhone app combos that really work well together. Step one was finding a replacement for my beloved QuickSilver. I had abandoned QS well over a year ago due to performance issues on most of my Macs, but after a nagging pain in my wrist surfaced, I realized I had to find more keyboard shortcuts. Enter LaunchBar, which fills in for 90% of what QuickSilver used to do for me. LaunchBar is one Ctrl-Space (configurable, of course) away from Spotlight searching, Google searching, application launching, math calculations and much, much more. LaunchBar is $25 around $35 per seat, and worth taking 15 minutes to learn the basics. Go ahead, hate me for giving up QS, but try LaunchBar before you hurl the insults. Next I needed a better way to juggle 3 Gmail accounts. But I also needed a way to track the metric ton of inbox items that flow through those email conduits. The solution was the combination of MailPlane and Things. I had really dedicated my heart to Toodledo, but there's one trick I couldn't replicate on any setup (The Hit List included): when I get an email in MailPlane, I can select some text and press Shift-Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-0 and the Things HUD pops up and autofills the notes section with a link to the email itself. It is awesome. Not perfect, mind you, but a huge thing for me. Read on for more power tools and tips.
BusyCal is out and just as awesome as BusySync
Let's face it, data sync is the real Big Bag of Hurt in our brave, digital world. But since I started using BusySync over a year ago, much of my calendar sync issues have dissolved away. BusyCal, the successor to BusySync, was recently released and it is just as amazing as BusySync at keeping your iCal and Google Calendar data in sync. In fact, it is much, much better than BusySync because it is an iCal replacement. The idea is simple: you want to have 2-way sync between your iCal stuff, your Google calendar stuff and any local Macs. Simple, yes, but so complicated very few do it right. There's MobileMe if you stick with Apple's solution, and Google Sync if you are a devout Gmail user, but there's still the issue of 2-way sync when it comes to subscribing to calendars. And let's not forget that MobileMe data has to go to Apple's servers when you could sync between computers locally, right? BusySync fixed all of this for me. Local Macs used Bonjour to connect and sync, and my Google calendars appeared in iCal with seamless 2-way sync. Calendar data is a tricky thing, and the last thing you want to happen is to have all your appointments and reminders vaporize in an instant. However, I can report that BusyCal doesn't nuke anything. Like 1Password, you can always go back to Apple's default tools. Enter BusyCal as a full application. Why replace iCal? I have to admit, I was a little skeptical. BusyCal is iCal evolved, providing a better experience in several key ways. First, one feature I have longed for in iCal is a list view, a simple top-down view of every appointment within one or more calendars. This makes is much easier to make decisions about nuking an entire calendar at once, and is very handy if you have too many calendars or no time to go month by month, scanning for the right color or words. Second, there's a lot more UI finish to BusyCal, with easy-to-access panes for adjusting event info. Even Snow Leopard's iCal, which reduced the number of clicks it took to edit an event, doesn't allow you to edit events this easily. For you UIX geeks: a frickin' non-modal floating window OR an embedded entry window. What a concept! Adding to the ease there are some nifty extras, such as seeing your to-do's grouped logically or moon phases and the week's weather in your calendar. Of course, these options are all configurable, as is the Google sync option. More than nifty are features like rich text, adding images and stickies to events, a more advanced alarm window, and offline editing. BusyCal has, in less than 24 hours, become a mission-critical application for my Mac, both at home and at work. If you are a BusySync user, you can upgrade for $10, or buy new for $40 (per computer). It is well worth the price if you deal with lots of calendars. Be sure to check out our previous coverage here and here. I would also be remiss in pointing out Spanning Sync, which also syncs Address Book with your Google contacts, but works a bit differently.
Beta Beat: BusyCal from BusyMac
The BusyCal public beta is out! I got a preview of BusyCal while at WWDC this year, and have been anxiously awaiting the chance to put it into action. As the developers state on the homepage: "Think of it as iCal Pro." The next step from the makers of BusySync, BusyCal offers a full calendaring system with Bonjour and Google Calendar sync, iPhone sync via iTunes or MobileMe, full read-write access for multi-user calendars, and a plethora of other features and goodies. Dated to-dos are embedded in the calendar, optionally carrying forward if not completed on their due date. You can add recurring to-do items with the same carry-forward functionality. There are customizable views, including sortable list views, plus shared sticky notes, customizable graphics, live weather and forecasts (with sunrise/set times and moon phases), all in an easy-to-grasp, iCal-like interface. If you've ever thought, "Gosh, I like iCal, I just wish it had about 20 more useful features and could sync across my LAN and the internet," take the public beta of BusyCal for a spin. BusyCal will cost $40US per computer, or $10/computer for BusySync owners. Doing the math, BusySync is $25, plus the $10 upgrade is $35, so you could save yourself $5 taking the upgrade path, even with a new purchase of BusySync.
BusyMac announces BusyCal
BusyMac, makers of the awesome BusySync, has just announced its newest offering: BusyCal. BusySync is a great way to share and sync calendars across a LAN and sync with Google Calendar. BusyCal is a calendar application with the BusySync technology baked in. The screenshots have BusyCal looking very iCal-esque (BusyMac's website even says to think of BusyCal as "iCal Pro"), but with some additional features: Display graphics, icons and themes Add sticky notes to your calendar and share them across your network Live weather feeds within the calendar Rich text support Multi-user editing/offline editing Sync with the iPhone via iTunes and Mobile Me Sync with Google Calendar Sync with other Macs on your network with Bonjour So the inevitable question is, "Why not just use BusySync or Google's Calaboration utility?" Because iCal's To Do lists don't work with Google Calendar. Specifically, you can't create a To Do for a calendar that is set to sync with Google Calendar. So if you are like me, that means you have to maintain separate calendars (often an identical calendar) just to keep a To Do list or have a calendar integrated with a GTD app. The beauty of BusyCal is that you can add more stuff to your desktop calendar without losing support for MobileMe or Google Calendar or Sync Services. BusyCal will require OS X 10.5 Leopard and will debut this Spring. Pricing is $40 US, but if you use BusySync already or buy it before BusyCal is released, the upgrade will be just $10 US. BusyMac is at Macworld 2009 and we'll be sure to stop by the booth and take a closer look.
