If you're interested in trying out the latest features, improvements and bugfixes in BusyCal or BusyContacts on macOS, simply follow these steps:

1. Download the latest direct copies of BusyCal or BusyContacts from our website.

2. Launch the app and open Preferences.

3. Click on the Updates tab.

4. Click on the "including beta" checkbox.

5. Now click on the BusyCal or BusyContacts menu option (in the top menu bar) and select "Check for Updates..."

When a new stable update is released, you will automatically be informed via the in-app update mechanism.

BusyCal 3.7.3 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• Improved recovery handling of network failures for Google Calendar
• Duplicate alarms in an event are now ignored, and only one reminder is displayed
• Inbox notifications no longer synthesize when manually importing .ics meeting replies or cancellations
• Dismissal of snooze alarms now get acknowledged if BusyCal is running in the dock
• BusyContacts is no longer automatically launched for Birthday-sync if it's not already running
• Improved selection color for Dark appearance when accent color is blue
• Addresses an issue related to dragging tasks from OmniFocus where the title would get set as Untitled
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyCal 3 customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu.
• Mac App Store customers can update from the Updates tab on the Mac App Store.
• New users can download the BusyCal 30-Day Trial.

BusyCal 3.7.2 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• NEW: The "Group entries by Calendar" appearance option can now be combined with a new option: "before sorting by time"
• NEW: Advanced preference to enable the ability to show meeting invites for proxies (shared calendars with read & write) in the Inbox.
• Improved conflict resolution for changes made to events on an Exchange account
• Performance improvements
• Fixes an issue where ctrl-clicking a Todo would incorrectly enter it into edit mode
• Fixes a crash when adding locations via Quick Entry
• Fixes a Catalina issue where emailing meetings as .ics attachments wouldn't work
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyCal 3 customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu.
• Mac App Store customers can update from the Updates tab on the Mac App Store.
• New users can download the BusyCal 30-Day Trial.

BusyContacts 1.4.2 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• App Sandboxing improvements for Catalina
• In list view, clicking on the column header a third time, when changing sorting direction, now removes the column from the sorting list
• Photo size, when zoomed, is restored upon relaunch
• The "in the date range" filter for Birthdays and Anniversaries now ignores the year in order to correctly filter on birth-date "day / month" combinations
• Fixed a bug where where a newly created contact on a Google Addressbook would at times lose selection after sync
• Improved date format recognition when pasting dates into the Birthday / Anniversary fields.
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyContacts customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyContacts menu.
• Mac App Store customers can update from the Updates tab on the Mac App Store.
• New users can download the BusyContacts 30-Day Trial.

Starting with iOS 13 and macOS Catalina, the new Reminders app no longer supports CalDAV.

NEW: Direct syncing with Reminders [Beta]

You can now sync BusyCal directly with Reminders.app by upgrading to v3.8 (currently in beta). If you're interested in trying it out, please join beta by following these instructions.

The iOS app has also been updated to supported Reminders (currently in Beta). If you're interested in testing it, please join our TestFlight beta group on iOS by clicking on this link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/1vf2RDcr

More information available here.

Upgrading Reminders

When you launch Reminders on iOS 13 or macOS 10.15 for the first time, you will be presented with an option to upgrade Reminders so that it may offer you newer and better functionality.

If you don't wish to use Reminders as your primary to-do app, and instead rely on BusyCal or a host of other 3rd party CalDAV task management apps, choosing Yes will migrate all your to-do-only calendars off of CalDAV and into a private silo run and managed solely by the new Reminders app.

Your to-do-only calendars, along with their contents, will in effect be deleted from BusyCal, as well as a host of other 3rd party CalDAV clients on all other platforms. If this has given you unwarranted confusion, stress and anxiety, or it wasn't immediately clear that upgrading Reminders would result in loss of data in every other CalDAV client, please leave them feedback. They listen.

After Reminders deletes your calendars and to-dos from CalDAV, it replaces these with a calendar named Reminders ⚠️ along with the following two entries inside, reminding you who to blame:

• Where are my reminders?
• The creator of this list has upgraded these reminders.

Choosing No on the other hand, will keep your calendars and to-dos intact, and these will continue to sync with all other CalDAV apps, including BusyCal. The only downside of this would be the inability to use newer features offered by the new Reminders app.

Restoring from Backups

The only way to restore data would be to restore these from automatic backups BusyCal creates for you, on a timely basis. There is more on this here.

During migration, Reminders will also remove Calendar sharing from any calendars you were previously sharing with others. You will need to set these up again as explained here.

BusyCal automatically backs up your BusyCal database every day and saves your last 10 backups. If you wish to restore your calendar from one of these backups, select File > Restore BusyCal, select a backup file and then click Open. You'll be presented with a list of your calendars, check the calendars you want to restore, click Restore and they will be restored from the backup, overwriting their current contents.

Note: That any events that have been created or edited since the backup will be lost when you restore from the backup. If you don't want to restore an entire calendar and lose any recent changes that were made since the last backup, you can restore specific events from the backup as follows:

1. Create a new backup in BusyCal by selecting File > Create Backup.

2. Quit BusyCal.

3. Launch BusyCal while holding down the option key to display the Startup Options dialog, then select Start in Offline Mode and click Continue. When in offline mode BusyCal will not sync with iCloud, Google, Exchange or any other services.

4. Select File > Restore From Backup. Choose one of the recent backup files and click Open, then select the calendar that contains the events you wish to recover and and click Restore.

5. Find the missing events and drag them to your Desktop to create ics files of each.

6. Select File > Restore From Backup. Choose the most recent backup you created in step 1 and click Open, then check the same calendar you selected in step 4 and click Restore.

7. Double-click on the ics files you exported in step 5, or drag them into BusyCal, to import the events and place them on the appropriate calendar.

8. Quit/relaunch BusyCal to go back Online.

9. After importing your to-dos, if these got imported under "On My Mac" - that would be a local calendar on your machine, which won't sync to iCloud. You need to right-click on this calendar and choose the "Move to iCloud" option or manually select all to-dos in List view and drag them to the appropriate calendar under your iCloud account.

The Future

Once you restore your backup and BusyCal is able to push everything back the iCloud CalDAV server, your to-do only calendars will continue to sync without issues. Apple has only dropped support for CalDAV within the new Reminders app, their iCloud servers will continue to sync your calendars and to-dos between other CalDAV clients. 2Do app, for instance, has issued a similar explanation.

CalDAV is an open protocol used for managing all your calendaring events and to-dos, giving 1st party built-in apps no particular advantage over 3rd party apps. Apple has been a driving force behind this for decades, and so we don't see this going away. The rest of your calendars and events will be fine as they are.

However, it does look like they wanted to add a lot more functionality and features to the Reminders app, and given CalDAV as a protocol is limited in what it offers, they decided to drop support for CalDAV altogether. This isn't a bad thing, but this does mean you lose the capability of syncing your to-dos seamlessly between apps and platforms.

If you feel Apple should provide users with an option to sync this back to CalDAV, please leave them feedback.

Key Takeaways

Once you upgrade to the new Reminders app:

1. The new Reminders app will not sync with older macs and iOS devices, even between Reminders

2. The new Reminders app will not sync with BusyCal and vice versa as it has dropped support for CalDAV

3. There is currently no way of pushing data from BusyCal → the new Reminders app and vice versa.

4. To-dos added to BusyCal will show up on all CalDAV clients other than the new Reminders app, including older versions of Reminders

BusyCal 3.7.1 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• NEW: Modern Authentication (MFA / 2FA / SSO) support for Office 365 accounts.
• NEW: You can now change the privacy setting on meeting invites received for supported CalDAV servers (such as Google Calendar)
• NEW: A new setting under Appearance Preferences allows you to display events grouped by calendar in Month view and the all-day section in Day / Week views
• NEW: Attendees in a meeting invite can at times be of an arbitrary length. The "my status" options now appear above the attendee list to avoid having to scroll down.
• Improved handling of time-outs from Exchange when using push sync with multiple delegates
• Improved detection and correction of malformed recurrence rules in calendar subscriptions
• When printing Day view, the To-do list is now automatically hidden when there are no tasks to print
• Day / Week view now display the text "DST" for the DST transition hour for clarity
• Custom travel time input now accepts decimal numbers, such as "2.5 hours"
• Added automatic handling of invites when coming from @me.com for users still on @mac.com
• Collapsed calendar groups no longer automatically expand when selecting events in the calendar
• Fixed a bug where some users were unable to create To-Dos on a locally shared calendar over WAN
• Fixed banner appearance in menu app for Dark Mode
• Fixed a bug where the location field would not present suggestions of Contacts marked as organizations
• Fixed a bug where printing in list mode would skip certain pages if the text size was set to Large
• Fixed a bug where a meeting from iCloud would display a cryptic URL instead of the organizer's real email address
• Fixed a bug where the left panel would scroll back to the top when reordering lists
• Fixed a bug where all day detached events from exchange would at times would ignore the originally assigned timezone
• Fixed tentative day colors in the availability viewer for Dark Mode
• Performance improvements
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyCal 3 customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu.
• Mac App Store customers can update from the Updates tab on the Mac App Store.
• New users can download the BusyCal 30-Day Trial.

BusyContacts 1.4.1 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• NEW: Modern Authentication (MFA / 2FA / SSO) support for Office 365 accounts
• Collapsed address books no longer automatically expand when selecting contacts
• Added UI changes to require additional privileges to access mail / messages on macOS Mojave and Catalina
• Improved detection and handling of unavailable mail / messages for a contact
• Fixed a rare bug where, under specific conditions, two words separated by a space would merge together in notes or multi-line addresses
• Fixed a bug with Google Sync where creating a new contact with a new group would at times not reflect the change on other devices until the contact is edited a second time
• Fixed a bug where committing changes to a field would at times cause focus to jump to the Title field
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyContacts customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyContacts menu.
• Mac App Store customers can update from the Updates tab on the Mac App Store.
• New users can download the BusyContacts 30-Day Trial.

BusyCal 3.6.9 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• NEW: Day view now displays an attached graphic on all days of a multi-day event
• NEW: New Appearance option to display attached graphics on all days of a multi-day event / banner
• NEW: Advanced setting added to preferences to turn off automatic conversion between GMT to Local timezone during sync
• Fixes an issue where deleting an occurence of a recurring meeting, imported directly from mail, would result in deleting the whole series
• Duplicating a detached instance of a recurring event into a normal event is now possible without duplicating the whole series of repeating events
• Duplicating recurring events will now prompt if you'd like to duplicate the selected event or future repeating events
• Added support for CalDAV servers that omit sending calendar descriptions at times
• Improved detection of changes from subscribed calendars that don't update modification times
• Fixed "last modified by" name parsing to work with recent iCloud changes
• Fixed initial discovery issues for OVH Exchange servers
• Fixed an issue where certain preferences would not stick when switching between Smart Filters
• Fixed a bug where turning off time display would show times for events on non-local timezones
• Event-search related optimizations for contacts with company names
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyCal 3 customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu.
• Mac App Store customers can update from the Updates tab on the Mac App Store when it's available.
• New users can download the BusyCal 30-Day Trial.

BusyCal 3.6.6 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• Subscribed and manually imported events in GMT now automatically convert to local time
• Improved background sync for large calendars
• Fixes a crash caused by recent changes made by the weather provider
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyCal 3 customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyCal menu.
• Mac App Store customers can update from the Updates tab on the Mac App Store.
• New users can download the BusyCal 30-Day Trial.

BusyContacts 1.3.5 has been released and is available for download. We stagger our roll-outs, so in case you don't see one available within the app, feel free to download the latest trial version.

Release Notes

• Sync improvements for large address books
• Ongoing stability improvements

How to install the update

The update is free for all BusyContacts customers and is available now.

• Direct customers can update by selecting Check for Updates from the BusyContacts menu.
• New users can download the BusyContacts 30-Day Trial.