FuseCal: An Alpha Missing a LOT of Features

I have four children. Four. And each one has his or her own calendar that requires constant syncing with my calendar as well as my husband's calendar so that we know who has to be where at what time. Calendars are such a problem for us that I try every single time/appointment manager as soon as I find it, from Sandy to virtual assistants. Since I still haven't found one app that does everything I need it to do, I was hopeful that FuseCal might be the answer.

FuseCal, still in alpha, is essentially a tool for web publishers to push their calendar out to users. Designed to work with Apple iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook 2003 and 2007, Windows Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar, you can find calendars on web sites from your favorite baseball team to your children's sporting events, and ask FuseCal to sync the calendar with your personal calendar program. If the sync'd calendars are updated, or event details change, FuseCal will update your calendar automatically with the changes.

The neat thing about FuseCal is that it lets site publishers allow their users to pick and choose their events. If you participate in a league that displays all games on a single calendar, you can subscribe only to the games that you need to, without importing the entire calendar. When calendars or events are changed or updated, it sends out automatic updates to subscribers, as well as email notification. Reports are also provided to publishers that show what events are being subscribed to.

For users, it allows you to sync with any FuseCal-published calendar as well as any iCal-enabled calendar, such as those on Google Calendar. Once you enter the URL of a calendar you wish to subscribe to, FuseCal will pull in the events and notify you as they are pulled into your account. From there, you can go to the site, select the events you want to add to your calendar, and simply drag and drop them.

In terms of how well it works, they definitely need to move out of Alpha, or at least add a few basic features that should have been there to begin with. Just to test the features, I used my Google Calendar as a test case. HUGE mistake, because DAYS later, it still hasn't finished pulling in all the events. There is no setting to only pull in current events, so if you wish to subscribe to an ongoing calendar, it pulls in everything. I get emails every couple of hours telling me that FuseCal has “found” 20 more events, many of which are from 2006, and I obviously no longer need.

FuseCal is also missing one of the most crucial elements of any online app: a delete function. I'm allowed to hide past events, but I can't delete them. At this point, I have over 200 events that I really don't want to see and would just like to delete, but I can't. They also apparently missed the Facebook drama, because you can't delete your account and start over either, and the “contact us” form on the web site may or may not be working, because I receive no confirmation that my email was sent. These are two features that are crucial, especially when it comes to an app that interfaces with your personal calendar.

For an alpha, it has a decent UI and functionality, but they have a number of things to work out before FuseCal can be considered ready for adoption.