It’s been two weeks since the public launch of Things Cloud. We’d like to give you a quick status update, and tell you about a nice little feature we’re releasing today – we call it Local Push.
100,000 Accounts
Interest in Things 2 and Things Cloud has been extraordinary. Since the launch, more than 4,000 people have been signing up for a new Things Cloud account every day. We’re very pleased with the performance of the service; in two weeks it scaled past 100,000 accounts gracefully, and continues to grow at a steady pace.
Things also became Editors' Choice on the Mac App Store and the top-grossing third-party app in the US — and more than 7,000 inquiries have come through our support channels since launch.
As you can imagine, all of this has left us very busy. If you’ve written to us and have not yet received a reply, we apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience – we will eventually reply to you all.
Local Push
Local Push is a little feature that didn't quite make it into our Things 2.0 release. We’re releasing it today with Things for iOS 2.0.1, and we’d like to tell you how it works.
Our Things apps are designed to update with Things Cloud often and automatically, so that you never have to trigger an update yourself. For example, updates are triggered when you check off a task, when you add a new one, when you switch to the app, and so forth. This ensures that Things Cloud and your devices are always up to date.
There is one use case, however, which is not covered by these triggers. When you have Things open on your Mac and your iPhone at the same time, and you make a change on the Mac, that change is indeed sent to Things Cloud instantly — but your iPhone doesn’t know this update is available, so you won’t see it reflected on the device immediately.
That’s where Local Push comes in. Now, every time you make a change on one device, Things sends an encrypted notification of that change across your local network. All your other devices on the same local network pick this up and request the changes from Things Cloud.
In other words — you can have Things open on all your devices, make a change on one of them, and see that change applied on your other devices almost immediately. Here’s what it looks like:
Update your iOS apps to version 2.0.1 and try it out for yourself. Things Mac was updated to 2.0.1 on August 12 and already has Local Push built in.
We hope you enjoy these updates.
Local Push requires an internet connection and works only when all devices are connected to the same router/local network.