Things Blog

By now, we have sent out invites to more than 13,000 people. And everyone who purchased the recent MacUpdate bundle also got access to Things. With so many new users, it is no surprise that new bugs were discovered. This release fixes the most important ones and greatly increases stability. For more details, see the Release Notes.

User reports indicate some potential crashes related to Undo/Redo. We therefore temporarily disabled undo functionality until we had a chance to get a clear picture of what is going on.

We would like to thank Dan, Grant, and Alex for helping us to discover one of the most serious bugs we ever encountered in one of Apple’s frameworks (Core Data XML Store). Under Tiger, notes that contained hashes (#) were garbled when Things was closed and subsequently reopened. This could even lead to archives becoming inaccessible. Apple already fixed this bug in Leopard and we have included a workaround in 0.8.3 so that Tiger users are now safe as well.

One of the pleasant surprises of the previous 0.8.1 release, from our point of view, was the extend to which the integrated feedback dialog was adopted. Already 4 days after the release, I cannot imagine how we ever managed without it.

We fixed most of the new bugs introduced in 0.8.1 and some older ones as well. In total, 9 bugs were fixed and 4 new features added.

The various lists like Inbox, Today, Next, … are now accessible via the keyboard shortcuts ⌘0, ⌘1, ⌘2, …. The other new features are mostly targeted to users new to Things:

• For each list, we added brief explanations which are only displayed when the corresponding lists are empty. Of course, there is also a close button to hide them permanently. The close button is displayed when the mouse is over the boxes containing the explanations.
• We added a start-up screen that is displayed when Things is opened for the first time. Later it can be invoked from the Help menu, which now also contains an item which opens the Things wiki. The start-up screen contains a graphical introduction that will be most helpful for user that hadn’t a chance to take a closer look at our web site.
• The current version has some limitations when it comes to drag and drop:

  a) Projects cannot be reordered in the sidebar (will be fixed soon).
  b) To-dos in active projects cannot be postponed or put on hold.

  Interestingly perhaps, we deliberately introduced the latter limitation to make Things easier to understand and use. However, we are much less sure about it now and are indeed working on improvements. That might take us a while, however, which is why Things now displays feedback when the user attempts such operations and explains that these limitations are acknowledged as such and will be fixed.

A complete list of improvements is in the Release Notes.

The new release contains 21 improvements and bug fixes. More detailed information about the new features can be found in the articles below:

• Providing Feedback from within Things
• Quick Entry Got Quicker - and Better!
• Dates, Dates, Dates
• Natural Language Input for Due Dates

Things now contains a feedback dialog, making it easier for you to get in touch with us. To open the feedback dialog, choose the menu command Things > Provide Things Feedback.

Using this dialog is a great way to send us your feedback. It helps us to more efficiently categorize your bug reports, feature requests, and support questions. If you want to include images or other attachments, just write a regular email to things@cu… (or click “Feedback” at the very bottom of this page).

However, to keep track of your thoughts or to share your suggestions with other users for discussion, the wiki and our upcoming forum are great places as well.

I’m sure many of you discovered that the Quick Entry Dialog can be invoked by pressing a keyboard shortcut. In the new version, this does no longer bring up the main application window. If you are on Leopard, the Dialog plays nicely with Spaces as well.

Also, the service menu entries for Things are now working again. You can select any text in your current application and go to Services > Things > New To-do Containing Selection as Note/Title. This brings up the Quick Entry Dialog with a pre-populated note or title field. It doesn’t stop there, however, since you can assign keyboard shortcuts for these entries as well. Just go to “Keyboard and Mouse” in the System Preferences and switch to the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab. Click the + Button and add “New To-do Containing Selection as Note” into the “Menu Title” field:

I use ctrl-alt-shift-space for this, but we are interested in what you are using. Feel free to put your shortcuts into a comment to this post.

But wait, there is more! Many of you wanted to be able to include references to files and mails in to-dos. Starting today, you can do this in one of the following ways:

• Drag and drop a file from the Finder onto the notes section of a to-do.
• Drag and drop a file onto the main application icon in the dock. This will bring up the Quick Entry Dialog with the notes field pre-populated.
• You can perform the above operations using email messages as well (requires Apple Mail 3.1).
• You can select one or more files in the Finder and use the keyboard shortcut you defined before (ctr-alt-shift-space in my case).

One of the biggest surprises was the amount of feedback we received on date related features. The single most requested feature: recurring tasks. Also users were often surprised that tasks due today didn’t automatically show up in the Today list. Then there was this irritating bug that prevented system wide date preferences to be honored correctly. Users also requested more convenient input methods like natural language input and a mini calendar.

We have every intention for Things to get a best in class date implementation. Today we are adding natural language input and a mini calendar for due dates.

The next updates will also bring the following improvements:

• An option to automatically move due items to the Today list.
• An option to automatically move postponed items to Next or Today.
• Recurring tasks.
• Alarms for tasks that need to be completed before a certain time.

Of course, these features will be implemented in a way that does not complicate the existing workflow.

Things now uses a single input field for entering due dates. It accepts many different formats such as 12/25/07, 12-25-07, 12.25.07, or Dec 25th, 2007. System wide preferences for the ordering of date components are honored.

You do not need to specify day, month, and year at once. Numbers greater than 1000, or constructs such as ‘08 are interpreted as years. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. are taken to mean days. Ambiguities are resolved by assuming the users preferred ordering. Non existing components assume default values.

Dates can also be specified using relative expressions like, “today”, “tomorrow”, or “in 1 week”. “2 weeks”, “3 months”, “next year”, or short variants like “4d”, “2w” work also. Weekday names can be used like in “Mon next week”, or “Tue in 2 weeks”. Words like “in” are optional and short versions for day, week, month, and year can be used here as well. A single weekday name like “Wednesday” will always denote the next Wednesday. If you enter “Wednesday” on a Thursday, Wednesday next week will be assumed.

Currently, the situation for users of languages other than English or German is not ideal. Names for weekdays and months are automatically translated by Mac OS, since we are using Mac OS’s date preferences. Words like “today, tomorrow, day(s), weeks(s), month(s), year(s)” and also short versions like “d, w, m, y” cannot be handled by Mac OS. Those need to be translated manually. If you like to have those words translated to your language as well, just send us an email with the relevant translations, and we will be happy to have them included in the next update.

We are often asked, when Things will be released or when certain features will be finished? It is generally not a good thing to publish detailed roadmaps. But I wanted to offer a glimpse into the future and talk about our general approach.

Today we released the first update since we posted the alpha version. It has taken us an unusually long time for reasons completely outside of the actual development of Things. From now on we plan to release updates on a roughly weekly basis. But we are not going to bother users with small bug fixes or technical changes that have little effect on actually working with Things.

There are two contradictory aspects to publishing software as work in progress. On the one hand, we want as many people as possible to have access to Things. On the other hand, we still want to be able to respond to feedback in a useful way. After all, why publishing unfinished software if not for early feedback?

But now, we have much improved ways of communicating and are confident to be able to provide frequent updates. We expect to have completed sending invites in a week or so, and shoot for opening up access to Things sometime in January 2008.

Releasing an alpha version — even to a select group of testers — is a pivotal point in the lifetime of a software application. From this point on it is no longer the developers for themselves, it is no longer the quite bearable lightness of experimentation.

Needless to say that we were anxious to get feedback from our alpha testers. But it quickly turned out that feedback was fantastic in ways we never would have dared to imagine. Not only the quality but also the amount of feedback was extraordinary. We sent more than 1000 emails in response to an equal number of incoming messages.

A substantial amount of time was spent to discuss, classify, and prioritize feature requests and bug reports. Unfortunately only part of it is currently reflected in our wiki. Users agreed that simplicity was one of the key features of Things and even offered ideas for future improvements. We learned a great deal about what was missing. Many requested features were already on our radar, but feedback was invaluable for us to prioritize. Several users emphasized that whatever new features were implemented, simplicity had to be at least kept at the current level.

Quite aware of the fact that we are in the process of sending out invites to more than 12000 newsletter subscribers, it was clear that we had to come up with an efficient way to handle all the feedback. We also noticed that server response times not always were as quick as we wanted them to be. We had to do something before further opening up access to Things.

We have now completed migrating our web site to a Joyent shared accelerator and are starting to improve the way we communicate. This blog, dedicated to Things and its development, is a first step, soon to be followed by a dedicated forum. But more importantly perhaps, we will be adding a “Send Feedback” menu command to Things itself, which will open a dialog containing a number of options for sending bug reports and feature requests.

One user recently spoke our mind when he wrote “to create something that becomes a part of other peoples lives is a dream come true”. Developing software with the help of its users can be adequately described as a journey. One knows where the journey is supposed to go, but it is much less clear what will happen on the way. Our journey has just begun. The enthusiastic responses we have received are a dream come true indeed, and we are very much looking forward to more of your feedback!