BusyCal 3.7 and BusyContacts 1.4.1

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/watchlist/busycal-3-7/

Adds support for MFA, 2FA, and SSO authentication for Office 365 accounts. ($49.99 new, free update, 22.3 MB)

And unfortunately doesn’t work with the new Reminders file structure, so can’t be synchronised to Apple Reminders.

Yeah, I just saw this too. This is due to Reminders no longer using CalDAV, as I understand it, so not something BusyMac has any control over.

Hopefully they’ll be able to adapt to the new way Reminders works (i.e. I hope Apple has made it possible for 3rd party apps to interface with Reminders), because BusyCal isn’t of much use to me without that. Probably 95% of my use of BusyCal is To Do’s, which then show up as Reminders on my iDevices. Of course I suspect it will be years until I update to Catalina, so I assume I can not update the Reminders when I update to iOS 13, and BusyCal (and Mojave’s Reminders) will continue to work, or is that not the case?

No, I understand if you don’t upgrade, reminders will continue to work.

It’s a real shame that the BusyCal folk aren’t considering a rewrite, since their calendar is tremendously good, and having reminders linked in to it makes it a winner in my book.

I’ve reverted to Fantastical (which does work with the new reminders).

BusyMac (the creators of BusyCal) have a blog post up on it, which basically says what you say, but also has the procedure to restore if you upgrade and discover you didn’t want to, although presumably that still won’t sync with Reminders on iOS 13 so you’ll basically be running two independent Reminder systems (to make sure you really get reminded :slight_smile: ).

https://support.busymac.com/blog/112990-reminders-in-ios-13-and-macos-catalina-drops-support-for-caldav

It’s curious Fantastical works as BusyMac’s blog post says “There is currently no way of pushing data from BusyCal → the new Reminders app and vice versa.”

When I contacted the BusyCal folk about a calendar issue last year, they said Fantastical uses EventKit whereas BusyCal uses CalDAV. I’m not sure if that’s the reason behind the reminders issue.

From the Fantastical FAQ:

  1. My reminders lists are not syncing, and I see a yellow exclamation mark in Preferences > Calendars, what’s happening?

This yellow exclamation mark means that you upgraded your Reminders database to the new format Apple is using for iOS 13. This makes Reminders disappear entirely on Mac because it takes them off the iCloud CalDAV server and moves them to the new Reminders format.

At this time only iOS 13 has access to them. Mojave and earlier versions of macOS can’t read them, and neither can Fantastical. Only the macOS Catalina beta is able to read them right now.

We’re going to release a Fantastical update so that it can see these Reminders on Catalina, but you will need to be running Catalina for it to work.

Ok, that makes sense, thanks.