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Dates and Time Zones

When you go traveling, you shouldn’t have to think about time zones. Your phone automatically detects your location and sets the correct time zone for you. Apps can then use this information, adjust as necessary, and make sure that everything happens on the correct day.

Due to the way Things previously stored and processed dates, however, it was possible for a to-do to show up on the wrong day when you traveled to a different time zone. For example, an item that was due on the 17th could show up on the 18th instead. While this would only happen in certain situations, it was unacceptable – and something we just had to get right.

For this release we’ve been through and carefully adjusted all the date-related functionality in Things. It’s been a considerable amount of work, but these improvements – which affect scheduled dates, due dates, repeating tasks, local notifications, and the Daily Review – are a good and necessary foundation going forward.

After updating to 2.2, you’ll never have to worry about time zones again when you go traveling; Things will know where you are – or should we say, when you are.

Better Performance in Things for Mac

When we first developed Things, our dream was to make a tool that people would use to manage the many aspects of their day-to-day life. Now all the time we hear people say things like “My whole life is in here”, “I can’t imagine working without it”, and “Things is my brain”. It’s amazing to us how central Things has become in people’s lives, and many of you have thousands of to-dos in your library by now.

There’s been a downside to having such a large library, though: in some cases, our Mac app wasn’t efficient enough to handle the processing of so many to-dos. For example, it could be quite slow when deleting a large number of to-dos all at once, often leading to an encounter with the nefarious beach ball.

We’ve identified the resource hogs and improved performance in key areas that were troublesome in the past. Below are some measurements we took before and after these improvements. Overall, the app now feels much more responsive, especially when you perform an action on multiple items at once:

(Even) Faster Things Cloud

Things Cloud is really fast in day-to-day operation, but there is one use case where we wanted to make it even faster: If you have a really large database, downloading it for the first time onto a new device (or a fresh install of Things) could take a considerable length of time. We’ve managed to improve this procedure significantly, and it’s now more than three times faster than it was before. This isn’t something you’ll do often, but it’s there when you need it – and makes moving to your next new device that much more seamless.

On top of these three enhancements, Things 2.2 includes more than 50 additional bug fixes and tweaks, and is available for download now on Mac, iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

If you have any questions or encounter any problems with this update, let us know on Twitter or contact our support team – we’re always ready to help.

During this period, Things Cloud has performed admirably. It’s had only two minor hiccups with less than 3 hours of interruption, and only for a small portion of our users. That’s an uptime of 99.9%.

We get an awful lot of feedback from users praising the speed and reliability of Things Cloud; some even say it’s the best experience they’ve had with a cloud service.

For us, and for our users, it has been an incredible success. We couldn’t be happier with how things are going.

New Status Indicator

Like all cloud services, Things Cloud is an ever-changing landscape; it’s always taking on new users and more data as it becomes increasingly active.

If we should ever run into any kind of issues, it would be great to have an easy way to communicate the status of the service – so we’ve placed a new status indicator at the top of our redesigned Status Board:

In addition to showing the current state of Things Cloud, it shows historic information about the service over the past 7 days – and also provides a place for users to report any problems as they arise. If problems do occur, we’ll change the status for minor hiccups or major outages.

Of course, we plan to continue on the success of our last six months, and hope that the status indicator sees very little action indeed.

As the new year gets into full swing, the Mac App Store is holding a Get Stuff Done sale. It starts today, and you can get Things Mac for a whopping 50% off the normal price.

This sale runs from January 24-31. If you’ve been holding out on getting Things for your Mac, this is a wonderful opportunity.

Things for Mac also updates seamlessly with Things for iPad and Things for iPhone via our free Things Cloud service.

Reminders & Siri on iOS 6

If you are running iOS 6, you can now easily enter new to-dos via Siri. Here’s how:

1. In Things, enable “Reminders & Siri” integration from within Settings.

2. Use Siri on your iPhone or iPad to enter new reminders. For example, you could say “Remember to send the job application”.

3. Your reminders will now show up in your Things Inbox, from where you can easily import them.

It’s that simple.

There are a few additional options which allow you to configure which types of reminders will show inside Things. For more information, see this page.

Reminders & Siri on OS X Mountain Lion

We’ve also updated the Mac version of Things to include the same Reminders settings as on iOS. For this, we had to use a new way of accessing reminders that is only available in OS X Mountain Lion. For older versions of OS X, Things still shows the old “iCal” preference pane. Here’s what the new preference pane looks like:

We recommend that you set up both your Mac and iOS versions of Things to show the same Reminders list. This way, your Inbox badge will show the same number on all your devices.

Please note that we’ve also removed the option to export your Today list to Reminders on OS X Mountain Lion. You can read more about that here.

iPhone 5

Things has also been adjusted to take advantage of the taller iPhone 5 screen. Here is what it looks like:

Things running on an iPhone 5. When adding new tasks, the title, notes, tags, and due date are now shown right away.

We hope you find the new integration with Reminders & Siri useful, and we’d love to hear what you think!

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.

Today we are happy to announce the release of Things 2 for Mac, iPad, and iPhone – a free update for all existing users. And we are introducing a new service, Things Cloud, which keeps your to-dos updated across all your devices – also for free.

Before going into what’s new, I’d like to put today’s releases into perspective:

Today is a big day in Things’ history. It sees major updates for all our clients, as well as the long awaited Things Cloud release. Many of you have been looking forward to this, and I want to thank you for your patience. We have been working hard on these updates and we are truly excited to be releasing them today.

Things Cloud

Things Cloud stores your to-dos and automatically keeps them updated across all your devices. All you have to do is turn it on in the Settings and create a free Things Cloud account. It’s that simple. You can read more about Things Cloud and how it works on its product page.

When we set out to build Things Cloud, we wanted it to be fast, robust, and scalable. There’s no way to achieve that, of course, without doing extensive, real world tests. So a little over a year ago, we started inviting our users to our Things Cloud beta. We then extended the beta by making it publicly available to everyone 6 months ago. During all this time, we kept enhancing and improving both Things Cloud and our client applications. By now, more than 30,000 beta testers are using it on a daily basis, and the feedback we get is phenomenal – our users love it.

We are excited to finally drop the “beta” from Things Cloud. It has been thoroughly tested, and it’s ready for prime time.

Please note: Things Cloud supersedes the old sync mechanism. If you rely on Bonjour Sync and absolutely must use it, please read this article.

Things 2 for Mac

Things 2 for Mac includes many new features. Foremost is the seamless Things Cloud integration. We haven’t just bolted Things Cloud support on top of the existing Mac code – we’ve actually rewritten Things’ core so it fits perfectly with the design of Things Cloud. The results speak for themselves: a nimble solution that does its job so quickly, you’ll hardly even notice it’s there.

The second major feature is the new “Daily Review” list – this maybe needs a little explanation. Previously, whenever a to-do would become due, or if it was scheduled for today, Things would automatically move that to-do to your Today list. This way, you would never accidentally miss it – but it also had drawbacks. Many of you told us that you don’t want Things to interfere with your carefully pre-arranged Today list. Just because you decided two weeks ago to schedule something for today doesn’t mean you actually want to do it, well, today. After all, priorities can change. What’s worse, there was no way to distinguish the items you had manually placed inside your Today list from the ones Things would automatically move there.

Things 2 solves this problem. Now, all due and scheduled to-dos appear in a special Daily Review section at the top of your Today list.

From there, you can quickly decide which items you want to start today , and which ones you want to postpone for later . To start or postpone them all, simply use the buttons in the top right corner.

Things 2 also includes many other improvements and refinements: It now has a full screen mode, we’ve reduced the window chrome significantly so it looks great on Mountain Lion, the app is fully sandboxed for the Mac App Store, and it offers a streamlined Reminders integration which makes it very easy to use Siri for entering tasks into Things. Things 2 is also fully optimized for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Things 2 for iOS

Just like the Mac version, both Things 2 for iPhone and Things 2 for iPad have support for Things Cloud, as well as the new Daily Review list. But there is more.

First, the iPhone version gets some visual polish throughout the entire app. Here are a few examples:

Second, we have built a completely new Scrolling Date Picker for selecting dates in Things. While the default iOS date picker is great for picking arbitrary dates, it falls short when all you want to do is select a date in the upcoming weeks – something you do all the time in a task manager. Even the Calendar app is not ideal, since selecting dates across months feels a whole lot heavier than it should – time is linear after all, and there’s no reason to introduce artificial month boundaries. With our new Scrolling Date Picker, the next few weeks are always just a tap away. And everything beyond, just a scroll:

On the iPhone, you can turn the picker sideways to see calendar weeks. And in the Settings, you can choose your preferred first day of the week if you don’t like the OS default.

Finally, Things 2 brings some often-requested improvements for iOS: you can now cancel a todo by tapping and holding its checkbox, you can tell Things to log completed to-dos automatically after you check them off, and lastly, we have greatly improved the accessibility of Things when using VoiceOver.

We hope you will enjoy today’s releases. Please download the new versions of Things, give them a spin, and tell us what you think. We’re excited to hear from you.

We have just released new versions of our Things Cloud beta apps. These updates will allow you to import your to-dos from the regular version of Things into the beta.

If you haven’t done so already, now is a great time to try our Things Cloud beta for yourself. All the data you import and enter during the beta will continue to be available once the final version of Things Cloud is released.

How to Import Your To-Dos

1. First update your beta apps to the newest versions on all platforms.
2. Now use either your Mac or iOS device to import your data. On the Mac, go to File > Import Database… and follow the on-screen instructions. On iOS, make sure that beta mode is enabled, then go into Settings and tap “Import Regular Database”.

For more detailed guidance on the import process, please view this page.

Since we announced the beta, more than 35,000 people have signed up to become test pilots. Over the past months, we’ve gradually been inviting more and more people. Today, we sent out the final batch of invitations. All applicants now have access to the beta on both Mac & iOS.

Our next milestone is to enable the import of existing databases into the beta. Until then the beta continues to use an extra database, leaving users’ existing data untouched.

We’ve had incredible feedback from our users, telling us that Things Cloud is proving to be both fast and stable. Some of our users have adopted the beta entirely and created exceptionally large databases. In the coming weeks we are going to work out some kinks and performance bottlenecks related to such large databases. This is an important final step towards enabling the import of existing data. Once the import feature is ready, we’ll post another update.

Thank you all for your continued support, and for your help in testing Things Cloud.

Things Cloud FAQ

If you already signed up for the original Mac beta – but haven’t been invited to the iOS testing yet – there is no need to sign up again. You will eventually receive an email with instructions.

Thank you for your patience, and thank you for your help.

Read the FAQ

Sign Up for the Beta