Things Blog

When we started the public development of Things, we invited everyone on an “interesting journey”. And interesting it was, to say the least. It also was a much longer one than we ever expected.

We are very happy to announce today that Things 1.0 will be released at Macworld Expo 2009, on January 6th. Here is what will be constantly on our minds over the next few weeks, the Things release countdown timer:

When you embark on a journey, you know the direction‚ maybe the destination; but you cannot‚ and in fact you don’t want to‚ control what happens on the way. After all, it’s the unexpected things that make a journey interesting.

Some things are bound to happen, like users strongly advocating features we previously didn’t deem that important. Needless to say we were happy to oblige: Things 0.9.2 Brings Support for Leopard’s System-wide To-do Service, Recurring Tasks XXL. Some things you wish to happen, like the iPhone SDK and the amazing iTunes App Store. And some things you can only dream of, like being mentioned on Apple’s iPhone page.

What was first, the hen or the egg? When relying on venture capital, it is clearly the company that is created first. Then the company creates its products. With an indie developer, things are not that clear cut. An indie developer jumps first and then learns how to fly. First and foremost is always the product; then the company is built to support and nurture the product as needed.

As paradoxical as it may sound, we found that the biggest enemy of an indie developer is success. The more successful we became, the less time we could spend on the actual development. This summer, when we were laying the groundwork for the future of Cultured Code, we even dropped the ball. We were no longer able to keep up with blog and forums. No doubt, people noticed. And how could they have known that it was actually us working overtime that caused the lapse?

We decided that this cannot ever happen again. But promises aren’t enough. After all, we are product guys. What we clearly needed was a communication guy. Hiring the right people is crucial to the success of a company. If you don’t get it right, you are doomed. That is why we are so happy that we have found the perfect fit for Cultured Code: Michael Simmons. He gets who we are. Michael will watch our backs and take care of any obstacles that may come up. In short, he will help us to stay what we are: product guys.

This morning, Apple gave the green light for Things touch 1.1. The most prominent new feature is the ability to sync with the desktop version of Things. It took us quite some time to find and fix most of the syncing related bugs, many of which were reported by our 100 brave beta testers. Thanks to all of you!

Other improvements are a faster dialog for entering new to-dos, an app icon badge, and a customization of the automatic logging behavior. We have also added localizations for French, Spanish, and Japanese.

Enabling Sync

Please make sure that you have both the latest desktop version (0.9.4) and the latest iPhone version (1.1) installed. Also, both your Mac and your iPhone/iPod touch have to be connected to the same wireless network. To turn on syncing, start Things on the desktop, go to Preferences > iPhone, and follow the on-screen instructions.

App Icon Badge and Automatic Logging

The app icon badge is disabled by default. To enable it, just launch the Settings application on your iPhone and go to the Things settings screen. The automatic logging behavior can be changed in this screen as well.

What’s Next

The past few weeks have been quite a ride. We all worked very hard to get the syncing update out, so now is the time for us to relax a bit and refill our energy. We have also found a wonderful new office to move into which no doubt will boost our productivity even more :)

Once we are back to coding, there are quite a few to-do items on our list. First, the desktop app will see some long awaited improvements that will push it closer to 1.0. The iPhone version will also get updates that bring bug fixes (if you find any), and support for Tags and Areas. We will post more details on the roadmap as soon as we get to it. And as always, we will keep you updated on our progress via Twitter.

As you probably know, before allowing anything into the App Store, Apple reviews not only new applications but also each update of existing ones. This process took quite some time for 1.0.1, but we are happy that it is finally available. The update brings important bug fixes and a German localization.

Syncing will be part of the next update. Coding of the desktop/iPhone sync feature is almost complete! Jürgen has successfully synced the 800 items in his library (not including the logbook). During the next few days we will apply final tweaks, ensure that the whole process is forgiving of network failures. And of course, we will be doing extensive testing.

Users of many other applications have reported data loss problems after installing updates, and sadly, Things is no exception. This is not a fault on our side, but rather a strange bug in iTunes/iPhone OS. From a quick survey on Twitter we can tell, that for most users the update went without a hitch. But a few users reportedly lost their data. As far as we know, no one has yet been able to reliably reproduce this bug, so we don’t know how long it will take Apple to fix it.

Once syncing between Things and Things touch is finished and available, the whole data loss issue will be much less of a threat. In the meantime, and for those of you who don’t use Things on the desktop, there is a procedure you can follow to prevent data losses until Apple has resolved the issue. Note that this procedure works equally well for all iPhone applications, not just Things.

Updating safely

1. Back up your iPhone by syncing it with iTunes just before you install any update.
2. Disconnect your iPhone and install the update on the device.
3. If you didn’t lose your data, all is fine. If you did lose your data, you can restore it from the backup. But you have to be very careful. When you connect your iPhone to your computer, iTunes automatically overwrites the existing backup with a new one. Since you just lost your data on the device, this will effectively delete your previous backup from iTunes! To prevent this, you need to do the following:
   1. Disable automatic syncing for your iPhone in iTunes’ preferences before you connect the iPhone again (iTunes > Preferences > Syncing > Disable automatic syncing for all iPhones and iPods).
   2. Connect your iPhone and wait until it appears in iTunes’ sidebar. Since syncing is disabled, iTunes won’t back up your data automatically.
   3. Right-click (or control click) on the iPhone and select “Restore from backup”.

We are happy to announce that Things for iPhone and iPod touch is available now! If you own one of those devices you may want to watch for this icon in the iTunes App Store:

Developing Things touch has been an incredible experience. The capabilities of the device and the software development kit are amazing. With just over one month development time, meeting the deadline for the App Store’s launch seemed difficult, if not impossible. But we did it and we couldn’t be happier.

The code for Things touch comes in at a quarter of the size of the desktop version. And we couldn’t reuse a single line from the desktop version. Everything is new and shiny, almost as polished as the box depicted in the app icon :) By now we are so exhausted, it is doubtful we will be even able to finish this post… :).

There were a few trade-offs involved: for one, we have at least two completely different approaches to the tags interface, and there wasn’t enough time for real world testing to rule out either of them, or to find the perfect synthesis. So rather than delivering the next best approach, we decided to disable tags in 1.0.

Second, syncing with the desktop version of Things is not yet possible in 1.0. Based on your feedback we decided that seamless over the air sync with the desktop version is a must. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to ready this feature in time for the App Store launch. Releasing a critical feature like this under time pressure without extensive testing is a big no no. Plus, iTunes automatically backups your to-dos every time you connect your iPhone, so data loss is not an issue. Of course, we could have delayed Things touch in order to implement full syncing. But considering the more than 100 amazing responses to our previous iPhone article, it was completely obvious that releasing Things touch even a single day later than absolutely necessary was not an option.

By now you can probably tell that version 1.0 of Things touch will not be around for very long. We will quickly add substantial features in a whole series of free updates. There are already two improvements that are not present in the desktop version. An extensive description of Things for the iPhone complete with screenshots will be available soon. We would be happy if you give us your support for our continued work and buy Things for the iPhone and iPod touch. As a courtesy to our avid Things users we decided to start at an introductory price of $9.99. Take advantage of it now, it won’t last for long. And don’t forget to rate and comment on our App Store page if you like to.

On the weekend we will be partying and relaxing, sharing some time with our families. But first thing Monday morning, work on the first update will begin. And then in a few days a badge on the App Store icon may tell you that a free Things update has arrived, one from many, that will make your task management even more enjoyable and effective.

Sort of ;)

Things 0.9.3 brings dock badges, more compact Next and Today lists, 8 bug fixes, and a new “Cancelled” status for To Do items. While the latter is obviously a new feature, the deeper reason behind it, was to remedy a limitation in previous versions.

Previously, when a project that still contained incomplete items was checked off and eventually got moved to the Logbook, the incomplete items still remained in the Next or Today lists. While this is not entirely wrong, it is probably not what the user wanted. Either the user forgot to check off those items, in which case there should be a warning, or there was a deliberate decision to leave those items incomplete.

Of course, obsolete to-dos can always be deleted. But sometimes it is interesting to keep a record of tasks that were once considered interesting (by a client or co-worker for example), but got axed nonetheless. It is now possible to state that a task got cancelled by using the corresponding new menu command from the “Items” menu.

Also, if a user attempts to check off a project that contains incomplete items, there is warning dialog that lets the user choose whether the remaining items should be marked as completed or as cancelled.

We also introduced an option to show a dock badge. In Preferences you will find a new menu which allows you to select which count will be attached to Things’ dock icon.

Please consult the Release Notes for a full list of bug fixes.

We have all seen how the iPhone enabled applications that weren’t possible before on any mobile device. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could carry all your to-dos in your pocket? Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a powerful responsive task manager wherever you go?

A resounding “Yes” was the answer we gave to ourselves some time ago when we began developing what will become Things touch. Honestly, will any mobile device that you carry around ever be complete without a personal task manager? We didn’t think so either :)

The iPhone and iPod touch are a huge opportunity for developers and an equally huge challenge too.

The opportunity

iPhone and iPod touch constitute a whole new platform with a new distribution model as well - the iTunes app store. These devices are used by many people that have never owned a Mac before and some of them may never will. For a developer there is the potential of reaching a whole new group of customers. Customers that may not know Things already, or are not able to use it because they are on Windows, or may not even bother to use the desktop version at all because Things touch is already more than they bargained for.

Challenges abound

• The iPhone user interface is completely different from what we have become accustomed to from the desktop. Naturally, we had to recreate the code for the Things touch user interface from scratch. No way to reuse a single line from the desktop version.
• Due to the unique limitations of the iPhone OS we couldn’t even port the data model code. Yes you assume correctly, a complete rewrite was necessary too.
• Fraser Speirs has an insightful article on how the market’s ability to establish a fair price for iPhone applications will eventually determine whether there is a sustainable business model for creating them. I bet that we are not the only developer having a hard time determining a price point for our iPhone application. A price point that will enable us to aggressively evolve and support Things touch for a long time to come.

While developing Things touch does draw significant amounts of resources from the desktop version, it is in fact rather beneficial for it too. Recreating Things for the iPhone made simplicity even more predominant. We learned a couple of things from the process that will help us to make the desktop version even better. The same goes for the data model code. Having had the opportunity to incorporate all the lessons we’ve learned from the desktop version resulted in a fresh new code base that will find its way back into Things, providing an even better foundation for its future development.

In the weeks to come, we plan to write more about how Things touch will look like. But if you’d like to get a glimpse of where we are headed, you may want to peek at Chris’ desk :)

As the title suggests Things 0.9.2 not only brings iCal sync but more generally support for Leopards system-wide to-dos. What is the difference? With Mac OS X 10.5, the database that stores the user’s calendar data was integrated into the system. Developers got a whole new API that is simple and fun to work with. More importantly though, changes that are made through this new API propagate practically instantly through the system. To-dos will show up in iCal, Mail or any other participating application the very moment you press the enter key in Things.

On previous systems, syncing to-dos between applications was a complicated process that sometimes even had to be triggered manually. Since we wanted to provide the best experience for our users, and most of them are on Leopard anyway, it was clear that we wanted to use Leopards to-do service instead of the older slow sync. Unfortunately the new and older APIs cannot be used at the same time. Providing backwards compatibility with Tiger is a whole new development effort, which we might attempt later along with .Mac sync.

Getting Started

You turn on iCal sync from Things’ preferences:

In addition to what you might recall from our previous post, we have now included an Options button. It opens a sheet (see below) where you can customize whether tasks show their associated project and tags in other applications.

These options are turned on by default. You can also add tags and projects from iCal or other applications. For example, adding “@Home” to the title of a to-do in iCal instructs Things to add the tag “Home” to it. There is no need to worry that this feature is triggered by accident, since only existing tags are used. You can safely enter email addresses for example. These won’t be recognized as tags and don’t trigger the creation of new tags in Things. The same goes for projects. Only existing projects are recognized and no action is taken if multiple projects with the same title exist in Things. Things is also smart enough to ignore projects that are already logged or in the trash.

We have carefully taken precautions to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot :). It is not possible to delete to-dos from Things by deleting them in other applications. Since we have no control over applications that integrate with system-wide to-dos, we cannot prevent situations where a large number of to-dos might be accidentally deleted by badly written third party apps.

It is also not possible to delete tags, or projects from other applications. It is just too easy to accidentally type over a title deleting all meta data that might be there. And to-dos removed from their project or missing their tags might be very difficult to find. The iCal sync feature has been designed with the assumption that Things is the primary to-do manager and that other applications, like Mail or iCal, are mostly used to conveniently retrieve stuff or enter new items.

Complete Control

If you want complete control over the syncing process, choose “Custom” from the Sync menu. The dialog transforms into advanced mode allowing you to associate different lists (foci), tags, projects, and areas of responsibility with each calendar.

You do not need to worry whether the list of to-dos you sync with each calendar overlap. If they do, Things will simply sync with the first calendar in the list that matches. Of course, you can reorder the list of calendars in Things.

The criteria you associate with each calendar work both ways when it makes sense. For example, if you specify the “Errand” tag for a certain calendar, then only items having the “Errand” tag are synced with this calendar. If on the other hand you enter a new item in iCal, this item will automatically get the “Errand” tag in Things. The latter, however, only works with a single tag. If you specified multiple tags, there is no way to find out which one you would like to be added in Things. The same is true for projects and areas of responsibility.

Usage Scenarios

Here are some usage scenarios that might not be completely obvious:

• When you create a to-do in Mail using a selection of an email message, the URL for this message is added to the notes section of the corresponding item in Things. Clicking on it will open the associated email message in Mail. Please note that due to a bug in Apple Mail, it will only honor the deletion of to-dos when running. Superfluous to-dos need to be manually removed from Mail.
• You can also use iCal subscriptions. Let’s assume you subscribed to the calendar of your significant other. Just activate this calendar in Things for the Next list for example. (You also need to make sure, that syncing to-dos is activated for the subscribed calendar both in your as well as your spouses calendar.) Your spouse can now send you to-dos, by simply adding them to the corresponding calendar. Note however that subscriptions are read only. There is no way for you to change such a to-do in iCal. Not even by checking it off. No matter what you do in Things that would normally cause the item to change calendars, or be entirely removed from iCal, will have no effect.
• You can use applications like Anxiety to create a HUD style Today list that is always visible.

Chris did a great job in testing the new iCal sync feature. But with a feature like this, that can be used in so many different ways, it is quite likely that it is not yet void of bugs. Hope for the best, but expect the worst :).

Users who opened Things after last Friday were in for a surprise. Instead of seeing their tasks, they were greeted with this expiration notice:

If you were unlucky enough to open Things too early on Friday (depending on your time zone of course) downloading the new version from our web site didn’t even help. It stubbornly kept displaying this dialog. What were we thinking??? It is with shame that we must admit: there was not much thinking involved…

Here’s the scoop: all of this happened completely unintentional. The dialog was displayed by mistake, due to a wrong date that has been left unaltered in the application code. Later on Friday, we fixed this and downloading the new version resolved the issue.

Why do we have an expiration date in the first place? Some time ago when we began to release public development versions of Things, we figured that we didn’t want those development versions still be in use after stable release versions would have become available. And we did what every developer does with public development versions: we put an expiration date into the application. We used a very distant future date to make sure the release version would be available long enough to allow users to switch to the release version. Or so we thought… The reason why Things will be released later than we initially thought deserves a blog post on its own ‚Äì iPhone anyone?

The dialog above is kind of OK. It tells you what happened and what you can do about it. It even offers to take you straight to our web site. But to tell the truth, we didn’t expect many people to see this dialog at all, which might explain why we didn’t take as much time and effort as we did for other dialogs. If we did, we would have made sure that a manual download wasn’t necessary. After all, we do have an automatic update mechanism, don’t we? Another shortcoming is the fact that it is not clearly stated that the user’s data is not affected at all. It wasn’t made clear that applying the update wouldn’t change the user’s data in any way, let alone delete it! This has certainly led to confusion among some of our users. Which brings us to an important topic.

Even though the whole thing was a mistake, there were quite a few users that were locked out of their data for several hours. From our point of view, this is one of the worst things that can happen. While Oliver Starr from GTD Times wrote a rather harsh article (and another one), speculating whether we are “insensitive” to our users need to have a “trusted system”, the exact opposite is true. We thought about this very aspect a great deal during the design phase of Things: How will users be able to access their data? What if they wanted to stop working with Things? How will they be able to export their data? And so forth.

All of this really boils down to one question: Who owns the data? There is only one correct answer to this question and it is obvious: only the user owns the data. Taken seriously, this answer implied that we as developers had to choose an approach as open as possible to store the user’s data. And indeed, this was a key priority for us from the beginning. We stated it on Things’ primary landing page even before this blog, the wiki, and the forums came into being.

To state this again very clearly, the release version of Things will save its data in an open, easy to understand and well documented, plain-text XML format. We chose XML because it is the most widely accepted file format for exchanging data between all sorts of software components. But at the same time, using modern style-sheet technology, ordinary users without any programming skills will be able to view these files nicely formatted in any web browser. It will be super easy for third parties to interoperate with the Things library by simply reading or writing small snippets of plain text files from and to the hard disk. Contrary to other solutions, like Apple Script for example, Things doesn’t even need to be running for this to work.

The development version currently available does not make use of the final file format yet. It does use a plain-text XML format, but a generic one (derived from Apple’s CoreData technology) which is easy to adapt for new Things features, but very difficult to use for third parties. The only reason it exists, is because it serves us well during the phase where Things’ data model is not yet fully complete. Of course, we have been working on our own easy to use file format all along and will roll it into future development versions as soon it makes sense.

Creating a new design always involves a recombination or evolution of existing design patterns and styles. It happens ever so often that one is inspired by another site’s design and that certain aspects are carried over into the new design ‚Äì albeit in a transformed and adapted way. This is the reason why web design galleries exist and we are both proud and flattered that our current design has been featured in numerous galleries last summer, for example here, here, here, and here.

A different matter, however, are pixel by pixel rip-offs. The software developer Panic, for example, has gathered a whole collection of those.

Yesterday one of our users (thanks Vitor!) pointed us to a complete rip-off of our current web design. It turned out to be the most blatant one I had ever seen. See for yourself:

I not only had quite some fun dissecting what the plagiator did do or rather didn’t do, I also learned a lot in the process. I am happy to present to you today our new tutorial:

1. Be sure to use the same color scheme. This makes Cultured Code users feel right at home.
2. Pay attention even to the smallest of details, like the little silhoutte icons in the navigation bar, the smaller dollar sign…¬†Only cowards cover their tracks.
   
3. Treat inconsistencies with respect. The original designer must have had a reason to use Helvetica in the navigation bar and Lucida Grande for everything else.
   (Which reminds me of something I forgot to update when I changed the whole website to Lucida Grande…)
4. Don’t even think about changing one pixel of an icon. You don’t want to mess up someone else’s work. Also, keeping the same filename makes maintenance a lot easier in case the original website updates their graphics.
   
5. Paying hommage to Panic’s Transmit truck is a must for every serious rip-off artist.
   
6. If the original website doesn’t have a contact form to copy, create your own. It’s not that hard. You can do it!
   
7. And for those who still don’t get it: Leave one link unchanged to prove beyond any doubt, that you must have completely copied the entire source code.
   
8. Claim a copyright.
   

What can we learn from all of this? The bold variant of Lucida Grande looks kind of nice in the sidebar. We should try that too.

We have just finished the user interface of our new iCal sync feature (or more precisely, support for Leopard’s system wide to-dos) and would like to share some screenshots. The screenshots are taken from a private development version. But before moving to the screenshots let us give you an idea of what it is like to implement a new feature.

Here is a list of steps we usually take when tackling a major new feature. We …

1. Evaluate all related feature requests.
2. Decide what will actually go into the new feature. This is a quite complicated step. We try to look at common usage scenarios. We also try to guess what the majority of users would need. Sometimes we postpone features because their implementation would take too long. An example is providing foldable pocket layouts for printing. We’d love to have it, but it didn’t feel right to make everyone wait longer than necessary before a fundamental feature like printing even shows up.
3. Try to find a unified point of view if the results of step 2 are too varying or divergent.
4. Try to think of ways how we could clearly communicate the ideas of 3.
5. Create Photoshop mock-ups of the user interface.
6. Start with the actual implementation of the interface and test it. If necessary, go back any number of steps and start all over again.
7. Create the engine or logic that makes the feature work.
8. Test-drive a functional implementation of the new feature for the first time. Go back any number of steps if necessary and start all over again.
9. Extensive bug testing and fixing.
10. Seed the new version and watch for related emails and forum posts. Fix bugs and make notes for future improvements.

With iCal sync we are now ready to move to step 7.

We had two requirements for iCal sync. On one hand, turning it on should be as simple as turning a switch. On the other hand, we wanted to take advantage of the existence of multiple calendars and make it flexible enough for usage with mobile devices and apps like Anxiety or Apple Mail. This requires that users are able to restrict syncing to different parts of Things like Focus lists, to-dos that have certain tags, Areas of Responsibility, or even projects. Obviously having both simplicity and flexibility seems contradictory. Here is how we are doing it.

When you select iCal in Things’ preferences for the first time you will see the simple variant of the dialog.

There you have it: the On/Off switch. Well, it is actually a menu and looks like this:

The most common requirement is to be able to export either all active to-dos (Next) or the currently pending items for today (Today), and to be able to import new to-dos created in other applications. When selecting either “Today” or “Next” from the sync menu this is exactly what you get.

If you need the full power of the underlying engine then choose “Custom” to transform the simple variant of the dialog into the advanced one:

The text fields offer auto completion and only accept valid input. It is possible to drag tags, projects, or areas to these fields.

We believe that the advanced variant of the dialog puts an amount of flexibility at your fingertips that compares rather favorably with the competition. However, there are still more feature requests related to iCal which didn’t make it into this version. But never worry, Things will continue to be improved at full speed well beyond the 1.0 release.

If you would like to comment, instead of sending us email, consider to use the comments section of this article or even better the forums. Your feedback will be much more valuable if your fellow users are able to read it too and respond to it.