I've been using various programs on my Mac as reminder managers ever since I got my first Fat Mac, but with the advent of iCal I've been getting more and more frustrated. It's very limited. It's awkward to add events, requiring several steps to add the event. The standard repeating schedule is every day, week, month, or year, with customize option, but the implementation seems awkward to me. Perhaps most important, at least to me, is that iCal offers only a limited number of choices when you want to "snooze" an alarm.

This came to a head when my wife asked me about setting up an online calendar that could be shared among the various computers on our home LAN. Friends of ours had used Google Calendar for this, but I felt it added an unnecessary level of complexity—and as far as I can tell, it requires everyone who uses it to have a Google account.

That's when I stumbled upon BusySync and BusyCal, two products made by a small company called BusyMac. They're similar in functionality, can work with each other as well as with iCal, and seemed able to do everything I wanted. I installed BusyCal on my iMac, and BusySync on my wife's iBook, to test them out.

BusySync and BusyCal are two different ways to share iCal calendars (or BusyCal calendars) with anyone on a LAN, without the need for a dedicated server. Let's start with BusySync. You can decide which calendars to publish to the LAN, and can determine if other users on the LAN will have read only or read/write privileges for each calendar; you can use a password for either option, or just ignore the password option to make calendars accessible to anyone on the LAN.

Of course, publishing a calendar to the LAN is only half the job. The other computers on the LAN have to subscribe to the calendar—but that's as simple as clicking a checkbox next to that calendar's name in the Preference Pane.

When you subscribe to a calendar, it normally synchronizes all events, to-dos, and alarms. However, you can remove to-dos and/or alarms from any individual calendar by clicking a checkbox in the Preference Pane

Calendar events can also be viewed or edited in iCal or Google Calendar, and can be automatically synchronized online in this fashion. If you have separate home and work calendars, for example, you can synchronize them via Google Calendar without the need for a MobileMe account. You simply set each computer to synch with the same Google Calendar event. (You can share calendars with a user over the Internet without using Google Calendar, but as the instruction manual states, this is relatively complex.)

If you want to share calendars remotely with someone who doesn't have access to the same Google Calendar account, you can do this too. Simply use Google Calendar's sharing features to link the two Google Calendar accounts, and use BusySync to link each home calendar to the appropriate Google Calendar account

BusySync's manual states that it will also synchronize calendars between user accounts on a shared computer, but I didn't test this as it's not needed in my situation.

As a System Preference Pane, BusySync is always running in the background, and it constantly synchronizes calendars with other computers on the LAN (as long as they're also running BusySync or BusyCal) using Bonjour. This means that there's really no networking configuration to be done. If you remove a computer from the LAN (for example, when you take your laptop to work), it will automatically synchronize calendars when you reconnect.

That's a lot of functionality, so why pay the additional money for BusyCal? What are the differences between BusySync and BusyCal? Let me quote from BusyMac's FAQs:

BusySync is a System Preference pane that adds calendar sharing capabilities to iCal, allowing you to sync calendars on a LAN and/or with Google Calendar. BusyCal is a desktop calendar application that combines a desktop calendar with the sharing and synchronization capabilities of BusySync into one integrated application. In addition to calendar syncing, BusyCal also provides the ability to enter and view event details in a non-modal floating window or an embedded info pane; create To Dos, including recurring To Dos, that display in the calendar and auto-forward until completed; display events in several customizable views including a List View and scrolling Month and Week Views; display graphics, sticky notes, live weather feeds and moon phases in your calendar; apply custom font styles and colors to events; and display alarms in a window and on the menu bar. Plus a whole host of under the hood performance improvements.

Ok, how does that translate into real life? Essentially, you get all the capabilities of BusySync, and then some. Well, almost all; unlike BusySync, which is always running in the background, BusyCal is an application, and must be running to synchronize calendars. And unlike BusySync, which synchronizes iCal calendars, BusyCal uses its own calendars.

Publishing and subscribing to calendars is just as easy as with BusySync. Launch BusyCal, right-click on a calendar in the source list (to the left of the actual calendar), and choose "Publish to LAN." (If you decide you want to make a published calendar private again, you right-click on it and choose "Unpublish to LAN"). The same procedure is used to subscribe to another calendar on the LAN.

There are many, many options available in BusyCal. You can view your calendar in day, week, month, or list views. You can choose to start the week on any day, and in week view you can view either one or two weeks. You can show or hide weekend days. You can add a default alarm to new events, and specify the number of minutes, hours, or days before (or after) the event occurs that the alarm will be effective—but you can change this for any specific event. You can add multiple alarms to a single event, if you wish—and each time you add an alarm, you get the opportunity to add another one. You can choose a default snooze time in minutes, hours, or days, but this too can be altered for any given event. (This is something I really find useful; it is severely limited in iCal.)

There's an information panel in BusyCal that's similar to what you get when you hit command-I in iCal, but it is much more customizable. You can also have it shown automatically as an embedded panel at the bottom of the To Do List on the right side of the calendar.

You can choose to have live weather data (from AccuWeather.com) for the next five days posted on your calendar, and you can even have the phases of the moon shown. Hovering the cursor over the weather icon in your calendar gives a slightly more detailed description, and clicking on that takes you to the AccuWeather.com web page. (Note: the forecast is determined by the zip code you enter into the application.)

There are options for to-dos also. You can have both dated and undated to-dos. The former can be displayed in your calendar, your To Do list, or both; the latter can only be displayed in the To Do list. You can choose to have uncompleted to-dos carried forward to the current day until they are marked as finished—or not. It's your choice.

There are lots of neat options here, too. You can add a graphic to a date or to an event, and you can control its size and transparency. If, for example, you have tickets to some of the Eagles games, you can drop a graphic of a football onto the days when you have tickets; it's a whole lot easier to spot these at a glance than to search for a text event saying "Eagles Game"—though, of course, you can have both on the same calendar.

Another thing I like about BusyCal is the ability to subscribe to WebDAV calendars on the Internet. In the screen shot of my October calendar below, you can see that I subscribed to both a Jewish calendar and a U.S. Holidays calendar. The Jewish calendar events are shown as banners at the top of the appropriate day, while the U.S. holidays are shown in grey at the bottom of the appropriate day. All-day events may appear in either position; selecting a "Holiday calendar" checkbox controls this. It's available on all calendars, not just WebDAV ones.