Even though Halloween was yesterday, we still have a treat for you! An updated preview release of Things which includes a feature many of you have been asking for: global searching.
That’s right — now you can search for anything, anywhere.
Global searching makes selecting a specific search type even more powerful. Confine your searches to only find items with certain criteria, like a specific tag. Simply click the magnifying glass icon in the search field and change your search preference. You can focus your search by only titles, notes, or tags, or search for all of these properties.
This way it is now possible to list all items with a certain tag!
If you’re observant, you will notice a new icon in the toolbar when search results are displayed. This new button will show the selected task in its original list. For example, let’s say you have an item which is part of a project. Clicking “Show in List” will display the project, highlight the item and even scroll to it if it is not already visible.
Of course, an update wouldn’t be complete without a little polish. We’ve made it so the selected due date button’s color now follows the Appearance settings in System Preferences. As you would expect, select Aqua or Graphite and Things will do the right thing.
As you can probably tell, Things development is accelerating as we get closer to our official release at Macworld Expo 2009. We are all very hard at work to make the official release worthy of the 1.0 moniker, and there are still more updates to come. Keep following our blog for continued updates and thanks as always for your kind words and encouraging support. :)
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Excellent progress!
Excellent feature!
Great application! By far the best GTD. Continue the great work.
Martin
YES, YES, YES, YES !
Thanks a lot, my feature request from feb. 2008 is finally obsolete !
Excellent! Thanks for all the hard work. Easily the most used app for me on my Mac and iPhone.
Is there a keyboard shortcut to put the cursor in the search window? If not, it would be a great addition.
Secondly, it would great to have three additional keyboard shortcuts that put the cursor in the search box, but pre-select what you’d like to search. So if I typed Shift-CMD-T it would move the cursor to the Search box with “Tags” pre-selected.
Thanks guys. Keep up the good work!
wonderful and amazingly fast! thanks a lot for this feature.
I feel this feature is not completly done. I miss a keyboard shortcut to fastly access the search field (is there one? I wasn’t able to guess it). And i miss boolean search, for example searching for “work fred” should search for work AND fred, but what I’d really like is “(work AND FRED) AND NOT projectone)”. Please? pretty please???
Nice to have search. Will 1.0 feature sync between multiple Macs? That’s probably the only thing that makes it really hard for me to use Things seriously.
Thanks guys! Keep it up!
These are lovely additions. Search is always handy, although I’ve not missed it to date.
I’m anxious, though, that Things is getting closer to a launch date and there’s still a bug that’s causing duplication of tasks for users syncing with iCal/Mail. As long as that’s still bugging me I’m not able to fully integrate Things with the other apps I use and beyond that my PDA, and that’s hugely disappointing because I really, really like Things. I get the impression that syncing with iPhone/iPod touch has taken a precedence, even though the “internal” syncing isn’t right yet.
Keep up the good work. I’d love to see better notifications with snooze functionality both on the Mac and on iPhone. I need constant reminders to get things done ; )
PS. I fear I may have sounded ungrateful earlier. The new features, true to Cultured Code form, are very elegant. And although I didn’t think I’d need search capability or the other features, I’m sure to be using them a lot!
Great job! Thanks for this global search feature.
All already use it a lot to do some cleanup :)
Things is one step closer to be the perfect GTD app. Add some ways to have “smartviews” and I buy it right now!
Note that I second thomasina’s remark about the annoying “duplicate” bug during iCal sync.
Things is really great - thanks for the fast iterations and the fix deadline. I use things since June 08, threw out omnifocus ;)
Two things that got my attention while reading the comments:
- Feature requests? http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Forget_Feature_Requests.php ;-)
- Nearly everyone here posted a private website that looked pretty professional. Although I wouldn’t expect other people using GTD, it’s amazing how you build this community around your software. Keep up the good work!
Congratulations Cultured Code. You’re getting there, to the most simple yet complete GTD software there is! Really a nice (big) piece of work! I use it every day!
The standard shortcut for search fields seems to be Command-Option-F, but it doesn’t work in Things (yet).
Then again, how much does one actually search?
Very interesting Features ;)
A drap drop like (for note) omni outlinner and it’s the paradise
Thx
great work folks. how about adding the ‘Show in List’ functionality to other areas such as in the FOCUS sections? it would be great to be able to jump from TODAY or NEXT back to the list. having this function somewhere in the menus would be useful too so we can assign a keyboard shortcut to it. thanks.
I really appreciate that all the problems happening in Tiger with “due Today” and scheduled items, and with automatic logging, are now solved. Thaks a lot for that!
This is great once again. I can’t wait for the team stuff going on… It would also be great to sync with multiple macs, iPhones and hopefully a webinterface. That way I could Get Things going on with my girlfriend too ;).
Seriously, I would love to have a shuffle option. Sometimes I still don’t know what to do of my Next section, it would be great to push Shuffle and an option would come op.
Thanks for things!
Good job !
Things is the best GTD on Earth !
I’m waiting for v. 1.0 ;)
I just have another “great job” to add to this growing list. Things is a wonderful program and developing very well.
I agree also about syncing between computers and also sharing tasks with others… this would be perfect for group projects.
Thanks for all your hard work!
I wanted to re-post something here, because I don’t know if people realize the power of the new search capability…
I’ve frequently requested the ability to get rid of Project and Area groupings in Next view. 0.9.6 finally allows me to accomplish my goal in a roundabout way…
For example, I have tags for Need, Should, Want. By using the new search functionality to search tags for Need, I can then get ONE LIST that isn’t segregated into Projects/Areas. Then I can further sort/refine the list with the regular tag bar (for example by priority or amount of time necessary). I don’t find the list confusing (like many people keep saying it would be every time I ask for this), because the Project/Area is appended to the beginning of each task (not that I even really need that based on how descriptive my tasks are).
WORKS GREAT! I can FINALLY see my list the way I want. It REALLY helps me figure out the appropriate thing to do next when it isn’t segregated into Projects/Areas. I already feel MUCH more productive! :)
Now if we could just have this as a preferential way to display Today/Next all the time… AND have basic sequential dependencies so that things which can’t possibly be done yet don’t show up in the list. (Of course the manual workaround for that is to not tag the dependent tasks till they can be done. But you shouldn’t have to remember, “Task A is done, so now go put tags on Task B so it will show up in lists again”.)
Either way this is a GREAT step forward with this searching capability! Even if maybe everyone doesn’t realize it’s power yet.
I can’t wait to buy Things, because to be honest, I feel guilty as hell for using such a great tool for so long for free…
Some polish I’d still like to see though:
1) More keyboard shortcuts, for instance to be able to easily change to a Project/Area and rearrange items within it via the keyboard as well (like command+up arrow to move the selected item up, command+home to move it to top of list, etc.). It would speed up my review process like crazy if I didn’t have to use the mouse so much.
2) The ability to file into Someday correctly. Currently when selecting an object and filing it, you can put it into the general Someday only. I would want to immediately put it in the Someday of the correct Project/Area, but Someday isn’t listed for each one, so right now it’s a two step process. Move it to the correct Project/Area, then go there and move it again into Someday.
@Jamie S, @Holger, @Sebastian, thanks for reminding me about the keyboard shortcut. I will make sure it is part of the next release.
@Joel Falconer, sync between multiple Macs is indeed very high on our list! We have been looking into various technologies already. Next week we will start working on the actual implementation. But this feature is significantly more complex than it might appear on first sight. So I am not going to make any promises on how long it will take exactly. Needless to say that we *want* to have it for 1.0.
@thomasina, @Pascal, I would indeed love to fix this bug. Unfortunately up until now we were not able to reproduce it reliably, which defeated our attempts to debug it. If you guys have a method to reliably reproduce it, please contact us by email with a subject line of “iCal sync duplication”.
@Eric, in the Today or Next focus you can already jump to projects or areas. The project/area headings there are clickable and get you to the respective “lists”.
@iuko, thanks for reminding us. We actually forgot to mention this fix in the release notes :). I have just now added it.
Hi Jurgen,
unfortunately, the “due date filter” button coloration isn’t perfect yet!!! :-)
Just hover the pointer more and more times on it without clicking. The button’s color gets darker and darker, without going back to its original light tone when you leave. It only resets when you change your project/focus/area.
This happens to me under Tiger.
@KenBotwinick, thanks for sharing the way you use the global search feature! Most of what you requested is indeed already on our radar. Dependencies will be not in 1.0 however. But, of course, our vision goes significantly beyond Things 1.0 :). And something tells me that we will find a place to add dependencies for people who need them, while not bothering those who don’t.
@iuko, thanks for pointing this out. I just confirmed that this is indeed a bug under Tiger. It will be fixed in the next update.
Thank you so sidebar dragging much for the updates. Things sidebar dragging is the perfect blend of sidebar dragging elegance, simplicity, and sidebar dragging extensibility.
It’s hard to sidebar dragging think of any other things Things might sidebar dragging need to make it a completely sidebar dragging functional app for me usually the only sidebar dragging things that prevent an app from sidebar dragging completely being a part of my sidebar dragging workflow is if a natural sidebar dragging instinct produces an error rather than a sidebar dragging result. I’ll be sure to send a sidebar dragging feature request if I can think of something.
Thanks! :)
What Rojer said. The more you inch towards 1.0 with all those (nice!) new features, be more anxious I get that this basic feature won’t be in 1.0. But you promised you’ll add it so I’m still sitting here crossing my fingers. :)
@Jürgen About “sync between multiple Macs” I’m curious if that means that you are going to be able to share Things with teammates on the same network cause that would really kick some serious ass.
Not even sure if it’s any help but that’s sorta like BusySync works with iCal. Maybe someone you should get in touch with to share experience with.
Love Things. Made my life so much more productive.
There is a Shortcut for Search…
just hit TAB
Great work. Only thing it’s missing is saved searches.
Well, I just updated and Things somehow managed to lose my entire last weeks worth of data. After updating and restarting, my ‘today’ list now includes items which I closed 5 or 6 days ago (now marked as overdue) and none of the new items I entered this past week are present. This pretty much destroys the whole use case of GTD for me. Ouch.
New features are nice, but this needs to be my lifeline, and I no longer trust it.
@nap, the update doesn’t do anything to the database. The fact that you got those problems just now is almost certainly coincidence. I strongly recommend you contact customer support. Since Things keeps its own backups, Oli might be able to help you. (Be sure to mention the version of the Mac OS you are running.)
In any case, it would be interesting to find out what really happened. I cannot remember any case in the past where a data loss was actually caused by the Things software itself.
Thanks for the update, and thank you very much Juergen for taking the time to comprehensively reply to the comments here.
Thanks also to KenBotwinick for his creative method of using the search function — adding to this, I want to point out that searching for ” ” (space) comes pretty close to the long desired “show every task” functionality (provided that you don’t use single-word-tasks).
Yay for the update, and many thanks to Jürgen for replying here. And I also want to thank KenBotwinick; until I read his post, I hadn’t realized how useful the new search function could be in organizing the display of tasks.
Excited about the 1.0 release!
I’m glad I could help point out the unexpected benefit. It feels good to contribute… :)
@Bonobo, you’re right. Using a space is a better simplification. I just always go through the motions of “What do I need to do now?”, “What should I be doing otherwise?”, “What do I want to do, if everything else is under control?”. I rarely want to see those three things together unless they’re cherry picked for the Today screen. So I skipped right over the simplest method of searching for a space…
I also want to thank Jürgen for taking the time to respond to our comments. It feels really good to get feedback. Do you guys have a roadmap for the next point releases up till 1.0? For instance, we’d like 0.9.7 to have XXX as the main new feature, and so on.
I would be amazing to include a new section of notes, dont you think?
With notes it could be the all in one application for organization!
Just got here to say thanks, your little program has really really helped me in the last weeks to get everything organized and running - you guys rock! Congrats and keep up the great work!
Aufgabenmanagement auf OSX mit Things…
Ohne Projekt- und Aufgabenmanagement kann man bei der Komplexität heutiger Projekte und Tagesabläufe kaum noch leben. Es gibt Unmengen von netten Tools, die einem bei der Organisation seines Arbeitstages helfen.
……
When I dragged a project to a person on the sidebar all the todo’s in the project were deleted. Then, in an attempt to save them, I quit Things on my computer and renamed the project (which was still intact) on my iPhone. But then when I opened Things on my computer again it even deleted all the todo’s on the changed project on my iPhone. I realize Things is trial software but for how much longer? It’s unreasonable the length of time it’s taking you to issue a functioning ver.1.0, very unprofessional in my estimation and the main reason why you will lose customers by the droves if you don’t remedy the situation soon. It just doesn’t seem like you are very serious about this software program and that it is not a high priority for you. Thank you for your consideration.
I really appreciate global search is finally there especially as I initially asked for it :))
Anyway, I think there’s a bug introduced in this release with FOCUS keyboard shortcuts (and maybe it was already reported, though I couldn’t find it quickly). Anyway, it could be related to Scheduled and Someday being switched, thing is - in the application itself, Cmd-3 moves task to Someday, Cmd-4 - to Scheduled. However, in the Quick Entry panel - Cmd-3 selects Scheduled while Cmd-4 - Someday. Anyway, it does work, but it probably would make sense to stick with either of these, not both.
@Aurimas: I just tried here and command-3 goes to Scheduled and command-4 goes to Someday in both the app and Quick Entry panel.
I’m not sure what’s going on with yours perhaps you remapped the keys with System Preferences keyboard shortcuts or perhaps you have some other app that remaps keys? Of course it could be a bug, so please contact us via the Support option in the Help menu of the application and provide information on this problem.
@Michael: thanks. I have made same tests with a newly created user on system and then on my wife’s mac - same problem. So I just submitted bug report just as you recommended.
At some point tonight working through my task list I just got struck by how beautiful Things is. All the little touches, the detail of the icons, makes it so clean. The Touch version interface makes me think Zen. Nice job guys.
I just downloaded Things desktop and iPhone presuming I could sync them. Am I to understand they only sync through MobileMe and cannot synch through USB cable like iTunes does it?
@roger wilco, @Jerry: I sidebar dragging feel you :). We will soon start weeding out those smaller shortcomings (I considered global search to be a bigger one).
@Aurismas: This is a bug in the German version of Things. It will be fixed with the next update.
@Pat Dixon: Unfortunately syncing via USB cable is technically not possible for third party developers. We sync via Wi-Fi, you do not need Mobile Me.