BusyCal 2 - An alternative to OSX Calendar

This week, it's time to revisit the de facto alternative to the standard OSX Calendar application - BusyCal.

BusyCal is a fully featured calendaring and to-do list application that syncs your iCloud calendars, your Google calendars and most other CalDAV based services. It also integrates with your iCloud reminders, allowing you to view your reminders and events from a single application. As it uses iCloud data, events and to-dos created or updated in BusyCal are seamlessly synced across all your Mac and iOS devices.

The standard views in the built in Calendar application of OSX can be a bit limiting, but BusyCal has the flexibility to allow you to tailor your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly views to your particular requirements, and allows you to navigate your calendars quickly and easily. You can even display both events and to-dos in the main calendar view.

With extremely powerful and customisable alarms, BusyCal allows you to integrate with the standard OSX notification service, or even better, use it's own custom notifications. This allows you to dismiss or snooze alerts, not just once, but for minutes, hours or days - you specify how long to snooze for.

The new Menu bar helper app runs independently of the main application, and gives you immediate access to you events and to-dos, and allows you to create new events and to-dos using natural language.

Finally, I take a look at using Smart Filters to create and store multiple bespoke views of your events and to-dos, as well as using graphics to annotate your events.

This full tutorial includes sections on:

• Introduction to BusyCal
• Using Views
• Entering Events & To-Dos
• BusyCal Menu Bar Helper App
• Alarms in BusyCal
• Smart Filters
• Using Graphics

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