We run Mac at home with iCloud, Droid with Google Calendar for cellular, and iPad with iCloud for tablet... this app has allowed me to stay completely synched across all platforms. I can make a calendar entry on my google calendar on my Droid phone and it will be synched to our home calendar on iCloud instantly. Worth every penny!!!

I. m. h. o. the most important feature of this iCal substitute isn’t all the extra bells and whistles, but the fact that it allows the user who won’t or can’t upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion to access iCloud (as long as he has already used another computer to open an iCloud account) . Teamed up with Sparrow, an e-mail client which does the same thing, this is a great boon for owners of older Macs or who rely on Rosetta or 32-bit-only programs. Now if only somebody would do the same thing for contacts, we’d be completely out of the woods! Yes, BusyCal is a bit pricey (Sparrow isn’t -- the combined price of these two purchases is sixty bucks), but this is a lot cheaper solution than buying a new Mac. By the way, the developer is extremely responsive.

I know that this has features missing from iCal (such as local synching), but frankly I've found that this lacks the UI polish of Apple's calendar program.

I want to like this program but alarm window bugs and a poor selection of snooze options keep forcing me back to Outlook. It's too bad because the rest of the program is nice, very competently designed and a pleasure to use. I was hoping to at least see a fix for the alarm window bug (where it appears but is NOT the top-most window and the alarm item isn't selected in the list) but the bug is still there. How hard can it be to make a window appear as the top window? Common, fix this.

Well, actually, 4 1/2 stars:

Initially I did not think BusyCal had the features I wanted, specifically scrolling weeks in the month view, but thanks to MacUpdate members I found it. So then I asked MacUpdate to remove my previous errorenous comments.

Now I have tried and bought BusyCal because I find it a very user friendly and a feature-filled calendar.

I should subtract a 1/2 star because the weekend date box colors cannot be customized. Currently there is only a very slight grey tint for the weekend date boxes—not enough for me to easily distinguish the weekends from the weekdays. In fact I almost did not buy BusyCal until I noticed the the weekend date numbers are a bright red color while the weekday date numbers are black; so this was enough to change my mind. Still, the colors of the date boxes and date numbers should be customizable; not everyone likes bright red weekend date numbers!

Another minor quibble is that the toolbar area at the top is not customizable. The "today" button is located at left border; not real convenient. And other common commands should be able to be placed in the toolbar area for convenience. (Fortunately I use Quickeys to make my own toolbar and place the commom commands in it. So it works, kind of.)

I had a little problem with the text baseline shifting a bit too low in a banner when I tried changing the font, but I eventually got it back to normal.

Also for the first time ever I have synked a calendar program with my wife's computer over LAN. The setup was trivially easy and it works very well and is a nice addition to keeping our appointments up-to-date with each other.

BusyCal nice calendar for my needs. I like the feeling of this program. And it is far better than iCal which I gave up on many years ago.

Tom