Calendars 5 for iOS makes Google Calendar useable -- at a fraction of the cost of Fantastical. It reminds me of PalmOS DateBk 5 and 6.
For me the main flaw is that it uses Google Contacts for the attendee names and emails. I keep my Contacts in Apple Contacts.
Turns out that if you include at least 1 local Calendar it will also use Apple Contacts. Birthdays works for this. So I included that.
This should be a setting, but I'm glad to to know of the workaround via Calendars tech support.
I've used Appigo's ToDo app for about 12 years (with Toodledo at first). It's had problems over the years, but in general it's been a good subscription choice. There's a fairly hard data lock (maybe SQLite?) but manual reentry is feasible albeit annoying.
Lately, however, ToDo has been more ragged. A recent server side change induced a date bug (time zone?) that in turn showed me I was using a macOS app last updated in 2016. It appears to have been abandoned on the Mac App Store. When I went to Twitter I found Appigo's account was closed years ago for violating TOS. Eventually I found I could download a current version of their other App Store app from their web site.
At the moment the app is more or less working again, though parts of the macOS app UI are kind of weird. I figure there was some violent ownership transition with lost dev passwords in Appigo's history (maybe they got ransomwared?).
I decided to go shopping again. I'm looking at:
Even since iOS 11 editing in Appigo’s Todo Cloud.app has been buggy for me on iPad and iPhone alike. Just aggravating. Feels like they failed to revamp something. I wasn’t delighted with their sync technology, but I could live with that. The editing bugs finally broke me.
So I decided to exit. Somehow I remembered Todo Cloud is a subscription service. I found my way to the somewhat hidden account settings and disabled premium. Turns out that turns off auto-renewal.
Hope it really works.
Appigo is a textbook example of how subscription solutions can disappoint. They never provided a good export strategy, so there’s a strong data lock. Then they failed to do minimal maintenance but continued to collect subscription revenue and sell the app.
So what will the replacement be? I’d like a product that
I evaluated Things.app and OmniFocus. Things got #1 and 3. OmniFocus got #1 and 4. Neither got #2.
Hmm.
On the other hand, Reminders.app for iOS got #2 and #3 and it’s free. So it’s weirdly in contention.
For now I’m using Reminders.app for tasks and Trello for projects. I manually copying over tasks that had dates, it’s not too bad. The backlog of ‘someday’ tasks I’ll gradually slog away at.
If Things gets some data export I’ll probably buy it, but it’s expensive since it’s not a universal app. If OmniFocus gets family sharing I might buy it. Meanwhile I’ll see what I can make Reminders do.
I think this is my first significant iOS functional regression.
Update 5/22/2018
I just discovered I wrote about this in 2011 …
There are no great task managers for the iPhone - but there's hope for 2011
… Neither Things, nor Appigo’s ToDo.app (which I have used incessantly since 2008), nor OmniFocus, nor Remember the Milk.app nor Toodledo.app are a great solution. They all fall short…
Seven years later and ToDo.app is moribund (I’ve been using it for 10 years!) and both OmniFocus and Things are still flawed.
Since I first wrote this I’ve run into issues with Reminders.app — including sync bugs and even text editor bugs. On the other hand, OmniFocus is promising a web client. I’m going to transiently switch back to ToDo.app and see if WWDC providers some kind of family sharing for subscriptions. That would make OmniFocus pricing less extreme.
Two years after Simplenote.app for Mac was released with broken search it is now fixed in version 1.2. A product I rely on is not only alive, it’s even improved.
This was a significant rewrite and there is still lots of basic work to do. Tags don’t autocomplete (I think they used to in the prior release and they do on iOS). You still can’t apply tag changes to a group of notes. There’s no export of notes as text files from App. There’s no markdown support (not a priority for me but iOS version has it) and of course no support for images.
I haven’t used it long enough to spot any sync errors — recent versions of Simplenote were very reliable.
I hope this is a sign that Simplenote has a future. Now if they would only figure out a way for me to pay for it…
It’s been over a year since I first posted that iCloud invitations to a non-iCloud (ex: Google) account have been broken since 2011. Briefly, if someone sends an invitation from iCloud to my gmail address I’ll never see it. Somehow Apple looks up one of the four (that I know of[1]) iCloud accounts that I have, presumably one that references my gmail address, and uses that one instead.
In late 2016 Apple introduced an obscure workaround, an advanced iCloud (only) Calendar setting to receive event invitations by email — “if your primary calendar is not iCloud”.
I was working on a book chapter today so I revisited the old bug to check out the workaround. From my son’s (unused) iCloud Calendar I sent myself an invitation. Despite the setting nothing appeared in any of my (unused) Apple iCloud Calendars.
I waded through my Apple IDs to identify which one was associated with that Gmail address. I had to answer Apple’s “secret” questions [2] several times, but I found an Apple ID of mine associated with an iCloud account that did had the “receive by email” option enabled and had iCloud mail services. I tried from several iCloud accounts; none of the invitations appeared anywhere. They didn’t show as email, they didn’t show up on my iCloud calendar. They went into the ether.
Apple iCloud calendar invitations to non-iCloud addresses are still broken.
[1] Multiple iCloud accounts, some with email services and some without, is a longstanding Apple fiasco. Cook promised to clean it up several years ago and quietly abandoned hope. I periodically read hints from insiders that Apple’s identity management is more screwed up than even the most cynical outsiders can imagine.
[2] Also known as a hacker’s best friend.
https://www.icloud.com/#settings currently shows an “Advanced” subsection for restoring Contacts. It provides options to restore an iCloud data set “archive” from iCloud (not to be confused with restoring an entire iOS device backup):
Notes aren’t on the list though. They have their own note-specific backup restore option, but it’s at the level of an individual note and there’s no version restore, only the ability to undo a delete for 30 days by restoring a Note from “recently deleted”. (BTW, if you Share a Note only the Owner can “delete” — but anyone with Edit privileges can remove all content — and since there’s no version undo that means anyone who can edit a Note can delete it without a recovery option.)
Sharing is another area of odd inconsistency. Notes must be shared one at time, but multiple Reminders can belong to a set of People.
I’d like to see Notes add Google-style Note-specific version save/restore and share by container (folder) as well as Note, but there’s no rumor of that in iOS 11. I’d pay for a third party solution for iCloud, similar to what CloudPull does for Google App docs, but I fear the demand is too small (for example). An Apple iCloud Drive folder view of Notes [1] would be a big help; I’d then be able to restore an individual Note from a Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backup …
Anyone have an AppleScript to create a local daily snapshot of Notes? (There is this, but in Sierra Apple omitted AppleScript dictionary support for PDF creation).
The world moves in unexpected ways. We seem to be converging on a form of backup that’s a regression for people like me, but a big improvement for most. There’s probably some kind of futurist principle there — the good-enough mass solution will drive out the elite ideal …
- fn -
[1] The main reason I’m still on Simplenote is that nvAlt on my Mac maintains a synchronized file store that works just like this. Perfect data freedom — but almost nobody appreciates this …
[2] As of Sierra at least some parts of Notes are in /Users/[username]/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes. This location has changed a few times. Note content is distributed between media files (PDF, etc) and text in a sqlite database, so recreating an individual Note document as, say, an RTF file, is a non-trivial task. For example (sqlite browser):
I suppose Time Machine backups of this folder might be a kind of ‘restore all notes’ option, but restoring a version of an individual Note would be tricky…. (There’s something deep here about the ways in which we assemble bits to create something our brains perceive and our tools manipulate, but it’s beyond my ken. Once upon a time a BYTE article would have traced the roots of the Notes sqlite store back to database file systems of the 1980s…)
I last wrote about migrating contacts from Outlook/Exchange server to OS X in 2011.
Back then one of the issues with migration then was that Exchange uses X400 format email addresses. One way to make Outlook convert to internet is to drag contacts into an email — that produces .vcf files (undocumented) with internet email addresses. In 2011 I wrote that dragging into a local PST did the same thing. Not sure that still works.
Here’s what I did recently …
From OS X contacts they can go to iCloud as usual.
Incidentally, i couldn’t see any way to readily import a set of single contact .vcf files into Outlook 2016. It only wanted to import them one a time. Drag and drop of the files into Outlook resulted simply in Outlook opening each one until Windows 10 die.
Apple has a support doc on backing up iCloud data with a less than ideal recommendation for macOS Notes.app backup …
Archive or make copies of your iCloud data - Apple Support
To copy notes, open the Notes app at iCloud.com. Copy the text of each note and paste it into a document on your computer, such as a Pages or TextEdit document. Save the document to your computer. To export your notes as PDF, open the Notes app in OS X Mountain Lion or later. Select the note, then click File > Export as PDF and choose a location.
Maybe Automator could make this scale, but I’ve never had much luck with Automator.
There’s a better approach that, oddly, Apple used to recommend …
How do you backup Notes? | Official Apple Support Communities
Open Notes.
Select View > Show Folders.
Create a new folder called Notes Backup in the On My Mac section of your folders list.
Select one or more notes from your All iCloud folder. Holding the Option key down, drag the notes into the Notes Backup folder. A green plus icon should appear as you're dragging the Notes to the new folder. This creates a copy of your iCloud Notes on your computer.
If you have an iCloud section in your folders list, but not an On My Mac section, you will need to create one.
Quit Notes.
In System Preferences, select iCloud. Deselect Notes.
Open Notes. Select File > New Folder. Name your folder Notes Backup. Create a new note in that folder as a placeholder. Quit Notes.
In System Preferences, select iCloud. Select Notes.
Open Notes. You should now see a section for iCloud and a section for On My Mac. Follow the instructions above for making a local backup of your iCloud Notes.
For this to work you need to enable the “On my Mac Account”. That may be disabled on most Macs and I suspect Apple would like to get rid of it. Which is perhaps why it’s no longer part of the backup support doc. In any case this does work on El Capitan, it does scale, and it enables restore.
If you ask Google how to backup Notes.app, the AI presents this as a “pre-answer” above all web page results. Google’s AI does better than Apple’s support documentation team.
Apple needs a better backup/restore solutions for all of its iCloud data, especially Notes.app, but for now this helps.
Simplenote.app, an Automattic product I use a zillion times a day, is less dead than I thought. They just released a version for Android, I installed on my ultra-cheap Moto e and in the blink of an eye my notes are there.
Before I did that experiment though, I made a backup.
I launched nvAlt and my local Mac folder of Simplenote RTF files was instantly updated. I then zipped up that folder — maybe 2MB. Stuck the zip in a folder of things like that. A record of the state of my extended memory on this day.
Only a geek can understand the warm glow I get from that special level of backup. The age old problem of Cloud backup (how do you recover a single mis-edited note from a month ago?) solved. (But will nvAlt work on Sierra? Brett Terpstra’s long delayed nvAlt replacement drops Simplenote support.)
Now if only Automatic would fix the #$!%%! broken search on (only) the Mac version. I confirmed search works on the new Android version.
See also
I think I know how Apple screwed this up. It’s one of those evolutionary path-dependency things. Their iCloud calendar is the child of their old OS X Server calendar (via MobileMe). They bolted a web service atop a server side model. In the old model the client was where different calendar sources were assembled, not the server. iCloud/web is stuck with that model.
So when it comes to Calendar feed subscription assembly happens on the Mac, or it happens on the iPhone. It doesn’t happen in iCloud/web. There’s no UI for adding a feed to iCloud/web because there’s no application model for that.
Which explains Apple’s bizarre instructions for getting a feed to iCloud to iPhone via the Mac. Whoever wrote that up was probably sobbing with despair. I suspect the resulting iCloud/web calendar only gets updated when the Mac updates itself. Let me know if I’m wrong.
I think there are really only two ways to do calendar feeds in the Apple world. One is to add the feed to the iOS device(s) (calendar.app) and the Mac (calendar.app) separately. Forget about seeing it in iCloud/web - that really doesn’t work.
The other is to do the subscription in a Google Calendar and subscribe to that on Mac or iPhone (and give up on iCloud/web). But then you’re going to have to deal with iOS failure to support Google’s CalDAV sync select. So this is a geek-only solution (It’s what my family does).
Here’s how to do it the simple way (iPhone and Mac only, not iCloud/web):
A book project forced me to dig into a perennially painful topic — Calendar sharing and subscription in iOS and OS X (MacOS Yosemite) for Google and Apple.
I discovered:
iCloud Public Calendar Share link:
Google Public Calendar Share link:
Appigo has deferred work on archive and export of tasks and projects for at least two years and possibly longer. When I paid Toodledo to provide back end services I could live with ToDo.app’s missing features, but when I switched full time to ToDo for iOS and ToDo for Mac with ToDo Cloud support it became a real concern. I gradually realized Appigo wan’t showing any inclination to change.
I’ve tried one last ticket request:
[#85787] Archiving and Export of completed tasks and projects : Appigo Inc.
There are two closed discussions related to archiving of completed tasks and related request to export tasks and project data.I know about setting sync to 1 year, I know ToDo web version will paginate completed tasks (up to 1 year?) and I know I can access tasks via SQLite (but dates are proprietary format).
I know I can sponge off Toodeldo and use them as an archive format without sending them any money (unethical).
I need more than that. I signed up for ToDo Cloud and I use both the iOS and Mac version intensively, including all Project features. I can't continue using ToDo Cloud if I can't have long term storage of project/task information as well as archive export.
It's just an essential requirement. If you can't tell us you're going to do this I need to find another product."
I have a feeling I know where this goes. So I’m looking again at Things an Omni, and it may be that I’ll reverse my shift and return to Toodledo.
Travel Time for Appointments in Apple Calendar (Yosemite) is a nice feature, but it’s not compatible with Google Calendar. I suspect travel time is an attribute of the appointment, not a separate appointment, and it’s not a standard CalDAV feature.
So if you’re using iOS or OS X Calendar.app with a Google Calendar back end don’t bother with this feature.
Is kind of nifty I admit.
Please don’t put data into iOS Notes. Really, it’s quite horrid [1]
If you do you may find it’s stuck there. We ran into this when my daughter’s school iPad had to be wiped and we needed to rescue Notes that were only stored on her iPad (school iCloud account doesn’t support Notes, neither does school Google Apps).
I did this:
[1] I took a look at the folder where Apple stores Notes.app data: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes. (Yes, the organization is bizarre). The data is in NotesV2.storedata-wal. I inspected the binary file in Mavericks [2] and found it contains text of Notes I deleted long ago. So if you had sensitive data in Notes.app deleting it won’t remove it from your Mac. It seems the file is never purged.
More — in Mavericks, it only looks like you can drag and drop notes to the desktop. It doesn’t actually work.
More — Notes can sort of hold images and rich text, in some Apple OS but not in others. Definitely not in Google IMAP.
More — Notes was implemented unsung an oddball IMAP hack. It’s like nothing else.
More — Like Contacts Notes can have Groups / Folders in OS X, but in iOS you can’t do anything with these.
There’s still more…
[2] Yeah, I’m still on Mavericks. Yosemite has … issues. I’m waiting for a fix for the crazy network problem.
We need a way to remind #1 of certain tasks he has trouble remembering.
Yeah, a lot of kids have trouble remembering things, but #1 has a very different mind. Some things are hard for him to hold on to.
Thinking about how to do this I dimly saw, somewhere in the cluttered and drafty attic of my memory, something about shared reminder lists in iOS.
I remembered correctly …
You can share a reminder list with other iCloud users. You might want to do this, for example, to keep all the members of a sports team apprised of what needs to be done for the next game. As the owner of a shared list, only you can add and delete list participants.
Participants in the shared reminder list can view and edit the list (mark items as complete, add items, and delete items), and see who else is sharing the list using these apps: iCloud Reminders, Reminders on an iOS device, Reminders on a Mac, and Microsoft Outlook on a Windows computer.
Outlook? Really? I wonder if that’s true. This is old stuff.
Old enough that it works on Mavericks as well as iOS and iCloud/web. I created a shared Reminder list named after #1 that includes me, Emily, #1’s personal iCloud address and #1’s school/iPad iCloud address. Any of us can interact with reminders.
It was pretty easy to setup. Despite the reference to email in the documentation I was able to accept invitations by using Emily and #1’s iCloud/Web Reminder app. (Though, for some reason, on #1’s 8.3 4s I did have to accept the email invitation. Maybe just a sync issue.)
I suspect we’ll all get alarms, I don’t see a way to target a reminder/alarm to a specific person.
This will be quite useful.
I don’t use iCloud for much - Apple’s cloud functionality is almost as lacking as its reliability. Our family has used Google Calendar for 7 years [1], I use Simplenote and nvAlt [3] as an information store, Gmail for email [4] and Toodledo/Todo.app for tasks. [5]
That leaves Contacts in Apple’s badlands — they’re too tightly coupled to iOS and OS X to readily migrate. So Contacts are the only bit of iCloud I use; I have to admit that they have been relatively reliable.
Hang on — this does get to the part about forcing Chrome to remember an iCloud password. But first I need a bit of setup. I have to explain something about corporate life and personal data.
Fifteen years ago many employees mixed their personal and corporate data on business laptops and workstations. It wasn’t unusual to use a single email for both work and personal use. Ever since then the two worlds have been dividing - driven by legal and security concerns. Even thumb drives are encrypted on insertion now; data on the increasingly locked down corporate laptop belongs to the corporation.
Which is fine for email and work documents - they should belong to my employer. Contacts though — they’re a problem. They don’t divide neatly between work and personal — and my work Contacts are pretty important for my future employment and family food. So, when it came time to decide where my Contacts should live, I moved them entirely into the personal sphere.
Which is why I need to use a corporate browser (Chrome [6]) to access iCloud — that’s where all of my Contacts live. I need ‘em when I work.
Ok, so we’ve established I need to use Chrome to access iCloud. Now the problem — it makes me enter my password way too often. And my passwords aren’t easy to type or remember. There are extensions that once forced Chrome to store this password, but they don’t work any more.
So today I broke down. LastPass has a freemium model for online credential storage; the web app and Chrome extension are free. (LastPass charges for mobile services.) Unlike 1Password, which I use on iOS and OS X, there’s no need to buy a Windows client — and I don’t want to put all my credentials in the Cloud anyway. So I signed up for free LastPass, and created an account with a single stored credential - my iCloud ID and password.
It works fine. So one of my longstanding annoyances has been fixed — I can quickly bring up iCloud Contacts.
- fn -
[1] Calendars 5.app is essential for the Google Calendar power user — we have it on every phone [2]. My native iOS Calendar syncs to my corporate calendar, Calendars 5 reads the iOS calendar database so it appears inline with my other 17 calendars, including 1 for each family member and one ‘all family’ calendar. Our family grandfathered into free Google Apps accounts, but if we didn’t I’d probably pay for the business service. Free has been nice though.
[2] It’s $7 a user. Since it’s not funded by in app purchases I believe iOS family sharing would allow one purchase to support five users. If it did use in app purchases that wouldn’t work. FWIW we still share a single Apple Store only AppleID, I use a different AppleID with iCloud.
[3] nvAlt is in maintenance mode for now — but so is Notational Velocity. Brett has a commercial replacement in the queue, as of today “it’s amazing and will probably be released”.
[4] Google’s broke Gmail usability with their last UI redo. I use Mail.app on iOS and sometimes Airmail on Mac, but mostly I gnash my teeth and weep and use Gmail.
[5] Nobody would do this by choice. Is a legacy choice. Works and I hate to change things that work.
[6] The corporate standard is IE 9 — thanks to legacy apps. So IE for corporate apps, Chrome elsewhere.
Before the Omni Group created OmniOutliner, there was Symantec MORE 3.1 (Mac) and GrandView 2.0 (DOS) [1]. I was a heavy user of MORE, but I also owned GrandView. Like OmniOutliner, GrandView combined features of a traditional outliner with a spreadsheet (columnar metadata).
Recently Jim W and Daniel G scanned the GrandView Reference Manual. It's a bit of history, both of an innovative software app and of a time when floppy disks shipped with lovingly prepared paper manuals. Grab it while it's hot!
(I'll eventually move the files to my personal site and fix up the above link, but it should work for the moment.)
[1] OmniOutliner 3 imported MORE 3.1 outlines. I don't know if that's true of version 4, I haven't upgraded. I wouldn't blame them for dropping that feature!
Update 4/21/2014: I’ve yet to update my old web page, and I’ve more files from Jim and Daniel to post, but life is hectic. In the meantime I’ll share here a note from Gregory J on running GV in a DOS emulator on Win64:
Just wanted to follow up with you to let you know that I found a pretty easy way to run Grandview inside 64-bit Windows 8.1. I downloaded the "DOSBox-0.74" DOS Emulator Program and install it (the 32-bit works fine under my 64-bit Win8)
http://www.dosbox.com/information.php?page=0
Next, I put my Grandview Program Files and Data Files into a subdirectory c:\GV
I navigated to C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74 and I Run "DOSBox.exe"
At the Z prompt type MOUNT C C:\GV
then c:\
then GV.EXEAt this point I'm able to run Grandview perfectly. More importantly I'm able to EXPORT my Outline contents into an ASCII File (a/k/a a Text File) into the c:\GV subdirectory. Then I'm able to cut N' Paste text in this text file to use elsewhere inside of Windows 8. My goal is to find OLD data I have stuck inside Grandview and get it copied so I can use that Data in new programs under Win8.
BTW, Pressing alt-enter will switch to Full Screen (making GV highly usable) and inside GV pressing Ctrl-2 will expand everything in the outline to make for a GREAT text file export.
The DOSBox Tutorial is at http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Basic_Setup_and_Installation_of_DosBox
[This post was first written in 2013 and then revised in April 2016.]
When Emily said she was interested in Trello, on a day when I was at home tending to a recovering child, I leapt at it. She's done a fantastic job with Google Calendar, but she'd never found a task/project app she liked. Indeed, she has a bit of an allergy to them. Trello, it turns out, has a certain arts and crafts following.
That's a bit surprising, as I know Trello as a corporate-focused project and work management tool from Joel Spolsky's geek-loved Fog Creek software. It never occurred to me that Emily might like it.
I've used a number of Task and Project tools myself; particularly a combination of Appigo's ToDo.app and the weirdly named ToodleDo web service [1], but Trello is a bit of an odd duck. So I put together these quick notes for myself - it's a geeky introduction to Trello.
Service properties and revenue model
Trello uses a freemium web model with Android and iOS apps. It is easy to cancel the service and it passed Gordon's Laws for Software and Service Acquisition. You can use Google authorization or a local account. Google access requests are Contacts only - which is plausible.
Revenue comes from corporate sales, corporate buyers pay $200/year for admin tools, access restrictions, bulk JSON export, Google Apps org directory integration. Non-paying customers presumably encourage corporate adoption. They've added a $5/month option for "stickers" -- if they made this $20/year I'd pay just to support them. I worry about their revenue and longevity.
How Trello is put together
Cards are the equivalent of Tasks in Toodledo or ToDo.app and they are the essence of Trello. Not all of Trellow web features are available on the iOS app, but most are. Here's how Trello works:
Lists, Cards and Boards can be copied, so you can set them up as a template. Lists enable bulk operations on cards such as archive all and move all. Cards and Lists can be moved within the hierarchy.
Trello has "Power-Ups" that do things like Display Cards in Calendar format. The Calendar works well and it allows drag and drop between dates. The Calendar is supposed to have a feed that can be subscribed to from Google Calendar, but it didn’t work when I tried it. [Update 2016.04: The Calendar feed works well now, I use it to integrate project work into Google Calendar.]
Comparison of Trello to a traditional Task app:
| ToDo.app/Toodledo | Trello |
|---|---|
| List/Project | Board |
| Completed (Yes/No) | List (state) |
| Task | Card (but no done status [2]) |
Keyboard Shortcuts
Teams and Boards
If you’re using free Trello then you want to have a single Trello account for each Person — Trello.app for iOS doesn’t support identity switching. A Person (Trello account/profile) can be a member of multiple Teams. Each team can have multiple Boards, but a Board has only one Team. A single Trello account (Person) can be associated with multiple Google IDs.
So the relationship between a Person and a Board is controlled by their Team membership. In Trello web or iOS one changes Teams to see Boards that are Team specific. (This is more clear in the app than in the web version.)
Example of Trello Lists to organize Cards
These Lists resemble states in ToodleDo. I'd personally use Labels to indicate importance rather than create a List and the use of lists to reflect a schedule seems odd...
I've only been using Calendars 5 for a few hours and I'm in love.
I'm sure I'll hate it eventually, but I usually do my hating faster than this. Calendars 5 is the best calendar app I've used since DateBk 5; it gives me hope I can survive Johnny ("The Designer") Ive's kneecapping of iOS 7 Calendar.app.
This is what we've needed. No #$@$@ wasted white space. This is a Calendar app that lets us actually, you know, see the friggin' appointments.
It synchronizes with any one or more of Google Calendars, Google Tasks, and the "native" iOS Calendar apps. I think the Google Calendar sync is using Google's native APIs; I didn't have to use Google's odd web page to setup CalDAV sync for multiple Google Calendars. i had only to enter my Google credentials and all my 15 or so Google personal, family, and subscribed calendars were immediately available.
But what about my Corporate Exchange Calendar? I figured that wouldn't work - but I was wrong! I enabled 'Native'/'Local' Calendars as well as Google (when I first connected it seemed I could do only one or the other, that's wrong) and I picked up my corporate calendar that way [1]. (Calendar.app on my phone also has my Google Calendars, but native support is much nicer than CalDAV support so I disabled those.)
I don't use Google Tasks, but Emily has been reluctant to add the complexity of a separate task manager to her Calendaring. With Calendar 5 there's only one place to look.
List, Day, Week and Month view in vertical and horizontal layout are all effective on my iPhone 5. Did I mention Search in List view? Fast!
This is the Calendar app I've been waiting for. Not Cue, not Fantastical, not Agenda -- this one.
[1] I didn't try to edit that Exchange Calendar, that barely works at the best of times on Calendar.app.
[This is unchanged in Yosemite and I suspect is also true of El Capitan.]
This is what Mountain Lion shows as my Calendars as of August 2013 after standard setup against my Gmail account:
The accounts I see under "Google" are the set of Calendars my Gmail account has access too that are also checked in the web page that controls Google CalDAV access for iOS Calendar.app: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/syncselect
The Delegate list is what appears based on my selections in Calendar:Preferences:Accounts:Delegation, where options include ALL calendars known to Google, not just those selected in https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect.
If I check all of the calendars in Calendar.app (Mac) I'll get duplicate entries. If I disable "delegation", which appears to be Google's undocumented recommendation I get a neat list, but any changes I make in Calendar.app do not appear in Google Calendar (sync is broken, or, if you prefer, it's "one-way" from Google to Calendar.app).
If I uncheck Calendars under the 'Google' tree in Mountain Lion Calendar.app "Calendar List" and just use the Delegates sync is more-or-less bidirectional (not broken). That's what I'm doing for now.
I once thought Google was responsible for this mess, but given Apple’s software bungling over the past 4-5 years I think it’s more likely their issue.
