It feels like a simple thing to get right, and yet it's so not right. (2/2)

@davep have you tried BusyCal? It's a paid app, but does everything so much better. Especially when one needs to align events between different time zones.

@acmeCSE No, never felt the need to use any other app really. Apple’s calendar does everything I want and does it well; it’s just this one weird annoyance that doesn’t seem to have a good explanation or fix that bugs me.

@davep out of curiosity I googled this and it seems that the option to handle free/busy is actually available in apple calendar, but doesn't seem to work with all calendars. Seems to be mostly okay with exchange, but not with iCloud. Strange.
Yes, this is annoying.

@acmeCSE And yet I’ve got 5 calendars within iCloud, that I made; 3 have the busy/free field available; 2 don’t; and if I make a fresh one it doesn’t either. So it seems that at some point I somehow made iCloud-based calendars that had that field available. (1/2)

I’m now wondering: for a decade or so I used Google Calendar. I then had a period of overlap where I used Apple’s calendar app but used Google as the storage (as it were). Eventually I fully migrated. I wonder if the calendars that *do* have the field started life in Google Calendar and I somehow migrated them over intact (I’ve actually forgotten how I did that). (2/2)

@davep I think this is a similar experience others have as well. I just created a new calendar on iCloud using BusyCal. For BusyCal the busy/free flag is available and everything works fine. However, using Apple's calendar app, the flag is available…

@acmeCSE Is that is available, or isn’t available?

@davep “is not”. Sorry. It seems that the flag is supported by iCloud internally, but the apps are only supporting it sometimes.