The biggest new feature of Things 0.9.1 is native printing. Until now we only had Mac OS X’s built-in printing support. But since Things’ to-do lists are optimized for the screen rather than paper, the results were less than desirable.
When choosing Print from the File menu, Things 0.9.1 will construct a dedicated print document which is displayed in an extra window. Before continuing with Mac OS X’s standard print dialog users get a chance to customize the document in the following ways:
- Decide whether to print the entire list or just selected items.
- Change the font size. Note that since the print document on the left does not (yet) represent the actual width of the paper, the text may appear to be larger than the actual result on paper.
- Decide about the visibility of notes. If your list contains long notes that you do not want to print entirely, you can also choose to limit them to 8 lines of text.
Clicking the Print button will then invoke Mac OS X’s standard print dialog. Particularly interesting is the Layout pane. Using the Layout pane you can arrange multiple pages on one sheet of paper.
As an improvement we plan to combine our dialog with some options from the standard print dialog to create what Apple calls the Simplified Print Dialog. The idea is to have one single simple and uncluttered dialog that suffices in most situations.
Things 0.9.1 also contains the following fixes and improvements (from the Release Notes):
- Repeating items. Fixed a bug that resulted in “after completion” option not working properly.
- Repeating items. Resuming a previously paused item no longer crashes Things.
- Quitting Things before closing an edited item no longer results in loosing the most recent changes.
- The Things library is writen to disk more often now (after each edit).
Pinging is currently not allowed.
Sweet! Great work guys!
The Print Feature is beautiful!
GREAT work!
Verry nice. And very valuable to have such excellent paper presentation for this type of app’. Cheers!
w00t!
Thanks for reacting so fast to the after completion bug!
Love it! Exactly what I was after…
Excellent, simple and elegent. Couldn’t ask for more, things has just got a whole lot better in my book. Thanks
Awesome implementation. To be honest i thought for a bit that Things was put on the back burner since no real changes were being made, i’m guessing as of late most were bug fixes. However, with this new print capability it reaffirms that Things is for me.
Fantastic.. thank you very much, Printing is wonderful. However, can you fix the bug that keeps me addicted to this application, at some stage I need to do actual work, yet “things” keep popping in to my mind.
Well Done..
“Decide whether to print the entire list or just selected items.”
- No items selected: Print entire list
- Otherwise, print selected items
Just an idea. Not as obvious, but then again, so is Opt-Space etc.
Wonderful - may we ask what is next on the list? Is there a chance it may be iCal/Mail Tasks integration? Would you tweet the community with what the next area of dev. is?
Thanks again for the great print option
You guys are the best. Much time will be saved.
A very elegant and useful addition
Thanks for all the great updates - Things just gets better with each new release, and I can hardly wait for the 1.0 version.
I have found that printing does not work on a G4 PowerPC Mac running OS X 10.4.10, whereas it works perfectly on a MacBook Pro running 10.5. Hope this can be ironed out.
Great Job!!! Any chance of a sync option with smartphones/PDA’s or to another program that could?
@Daniel Beck. Your idea was in fact Chris initial suggestion. And it is indeed the most elegant way to do it. I must admit however that I talked Chris out of it.
When working with Things, most of the time some items are selected. So when you bring up the print dialog you often have to remember to deselect those items first. But when you are working with long lists it is not even obvious how to do that.
Even worse, it is easy to forget that something was selected in the first place. I already anticipated all those bugs reports stating that sometimes not all of the list was printed…
You see, this time we favored a more obvious or verbose approach. The Opt-Space shortcut you mentioned is a different matter. It is just a convenience thing. If you do not discover it, there is still the mouse to check items off. But if you do not discover the relationship between the current selection and printing then printing must seem broken to you.
Why am I discussing this in such detail? Because it is very typical for the software design process. It is actually quite often that such small details create some lengthy discussions here at Cultured Code :). This time we discussed three different approaches.
@Kevin. Yes iCal sync is indeed next on our list. Since Apple Mail mirrors iCal’s to-dos, this will also cover Mail on Leopard. We have been thinking about the general approach for quite a while now. I will tweet as soon we are ready to start with writing actual code.
@Kevin Bullock. We hope that most smartphones and PDAs will sync with iCal. Things’ iCal sync should do the trick for smartphones too.
@Gerard. Yes the printing issue on pre 10.4.11 Tiger systems should be fixed in 0.9.1.1, which will be release tomorrow at the latest. But see this forum thread for more background and why the installed version of Safari matters.
@Jürgen
First of all, kudos for you and your teammates. Really nice app. Second, I got a suggestion for the iCal sync: It would be nice to be able to sync an Area of responsability with a certain Calendar in iCal. What do you think?
Cheers and keep up with the good work!
@Miguel. I think the same :). I believe it is the most natural thing to do. But we might be even more flexible. There are so many ways users might want to sync. We want to be as flexible as possible without creating an unwieldy interface.
@Jürgen. Nice! Can’t wait to see how do you implement that feature. You guys are doing a great job.
thnx.
Hello,
I suggest an integration with Entourage (and Outlook), because several emails you receive are tasks, and it is redundant do create a task like “Answer Joe`s email on the event suggestion”. A plugin for the email client would allow the user to “transform” an email into a task.
Erik
Printing looks and works/responds fantastic!
Hope to see much broader “find” mechanism soon!
Thanks for all you be and do.
While I really adore ‘Things’ so far and could see myself adopting it for my team, the print feature is driving me up the wall. It seems like you went the low and easy road here instead of providing something that’s actually useful. But then again, it’s alpha.
Have a look at LifeShaker: http://www.funkycloud.com/lifeshaker/tutorials.php (sorry can’t link directly, some stupid Flash thing gets in the way of that).
They allow you to print a booklet. Much nicer and I don’t have to spend the extra $300 on a dedicated Dymo printer, like Things would require due to its poor page layout.
Another option would be to allow custom style sheets with simple extra tags like rotate(90); for example. So you’d have whatever WebKit has + more layout features and a plethora of designers that already know CSS.
One suggestion: how about getting out of the way first some not-so-hard-to-design/implement but important features like the general waiting list and 2-level projects/areas?
Wow. I think this was just what I was looking for. i am excited to see how this will work on the iPhone.
Bitte packt doch noch das Menubar-Feature mit rein, um so einfache Tasks zu erfassen etc….
;-)
Grüsse
Michel
Great - a list management software with GTD framework that does not get in the way of getting things done.
Looking forward to the full release.