I have a list of tasks at the side and can drag tasks to days or even to specific times in the calendar I can even change tasks into events or vice versa.

I use Agenda primarily to manage my projects, which means, I mix notes and thoughts and ideas and, most important, tasks I have to do.

When I decide that a certain task is ripe to be stuffed into my week’s schedule, I add a reminder to it, and voilà, it appears in Bus圜al, complete with a backlink to Agenda! If I mark it as done in Bus圜al, it’s marked done in Agenda as well. Only if I push the task around a lot in Bus圜al (“next week” … “I don’t know, let’s put it in the task list” …), Agenda sometimes loses the connection, but generally it does a good job of updating itself when I move the task to another date in Bus圜al. Anyway, it’s no big deal if the connection is lost the backlink still works. The three areas where they’re implementation is really lacking are: Just to give some insights why Bus圜al, Fantastical etc all “bypass” Apple’s calendar system and force you to log in separately to your iCloud and Google accounts etc has to do with the way Apple has implemented and limited what they allow 3rd party developers to do. They don’t ensure each calendar event has a unique ID across devices, which makes syncing events and associated data in your app quite hard. We have had to rewrite Agenda’s implementation 3 times and still it’s not always 100% flawless due to this limitation. They offer only a subset of what’s possible in the Calendar and Reminder app through the APIs for developers, for example while it’s possible to read attachments and invitees, we can’t add those to events through the APIs. And let’s not talk about all the features the Reminders app has added of which none is made available through the APIs (tags, sublists, etc). While most calendar systems allow for this, Apple doesn’t allow you to set custom data field for an event (which would make it much easier to set up a unique ID or associate say a link to a note in agenda without having to use the notes field for example. It means that if you are trying to make a calendar replacement app, you will have to go the route that these app have followed and talk directly to iCloud, Google etc. The good thing is that if you have these accounts also set up in the System Preferences/Settings app, the data will still sync, albeit indirectly, and arrive in Agenda, also if you use these apps.

I hear you saying, why doesn’t Agenda then follow the same route. Well unfortunately it’s still a hell of a lot of work to implement direct interaction with each of these services (login, implementing the correct protocols, etc etc), so also given our small team size, we’ve decided to stick with the limitations of Apple’s frameworks because we feel it’s still the right balance between benefits vs amount of work that we can spend on other : We have a form that is already so busy, unfortunately…. That to add an additional a long text field big enough to read and work in easily really is problematic in terms of the already crowded screen experience - and we would like to avoidĪs the field is only occasionally in play - the idea of a small button that opens a pop up form containing just the new field is a welcomed approach.

Busycontacts not syncing