We’re excited to announce a new feature: Mail to Things! A powerful new way to create to-dos from other apps, services, and platforms. Available now in Things 3.3!

The Critical First Step

Corralling all your to-dos into one place – Things’ Inbox – is the critical first step in getting control of a busy life and staying organized. For this to be effective, you need to be able to capture everything – only then can you be confident that nothing important has slipped through the cracks.

Until now, Things has provided four easy ways to do this: Quick Entry, Siri, 3D Touch, and the Add to Things extension. The problem, for some people, is that these methods are only available within the Apple ecosystem – and many of our customers have asked for more ways to create to-dos from more places.

So today we’re introducing Mail to Things – a new feature that opens your Inbox up to all sorts of new workflows that were previously impossible.

Let’s take a look at how it works.

Outbox to Inbox

Mail to Things is extremely simple to use. You send an email to Things Cloud, and it appears as a to-do in Things.

Try it out:

1. Open Things Cloud’s settings.
2. Enable Mail to Things.
3. Send an email to your new @things.email address.

It’s that easy. The email’s subject becomes your to-do’s title, and the rest goes into the notes.

Thanks to the ubiquity of email, you now have “Quick Entry” everywhere. Here are three ways you could use it:

1. Send to-dos to Things from other platforms, like your PC at work.
2. Forward an email to Things from your iPhone; Things will link back to the email so you can find it again later.
3. Give your @things.email address to a trusted partner or colleague so they can delegate to-dos to you.

Since any workflow that sends an email can create a to-do in Things, there are literally hundreds of ways to use this feature. Really – you can get seriously nerdy…

Powerful Workflows

Mail to Things is more powerful than it might seem at first glance. Thanks to various apps and online services – such as Workflow, IFTTT, and Zapier – you can use Mail to Things to build workflows that create to-dos for you automatically.

The possibilities for these workflows are so many and so varied that it’s too much to cover here – but we’ve prepared a support document with a few examples to show you what’s possible. You can adopt them into your own setup, or build your own.

Finally, just a tip for all our developer friends out there: GitHub allows you to set an independent email address for notifications, so you can use Mail to Things to have Issues delivered directly to your Things Inbox, with a link.

Funny that an email feature... creates less email :)

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As 2017 draws to a close, we reflect on what has been a remarkable year for us. We shipped the long awaited Things 3, which has been received exceptionally well, and even won a second Apple Design Award. In the seven months that followed, we kept busy adding some great new features and improvements: repeating to-dos in projects; Siri integration; support for third-party app links; drag & drop for iPad; support for iPhone X; and now Mail to Things. All the while, our heroic support team has handled just over 44,000 inquiries. What a year! Thank you all so much for using Things and supporting its development; we truly appreciate it.

More great improvements are already on their way for 2018, so we’re really looking forward to the coming year. Happy Holidays to you all, and see you in 2018!

The iPhone X is here and Things looks great on it.

When we designed Things 3 we got rid of as much of the app’s ornamentation as possible. As a result, the app is already perfectly suited for the iPhone X’s new edge-to-edge display – we only had to make a few small adjustments, which are available now in Things 3.2.4.

One of the changes we made for Things 3 actually turned out to be quite splendid for the iPhone X: the removal of the row of buttons along the bottom of the screen. Because this is gone, your to-dos now flow all the way down to the bottom of the device. It kind of looks like you’re holding a piece of paper (which is what we designed Things 3 to look like) and it feels really great in your hand. We think you’re going to love Things on iPhone X.

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By the way, we’ve also released 3.2.4 for iPad, which adds some basic shortcuts for external keyboards. We hope you enjoy these updates!

We’ve just shipped Things 3.2 with three awesome new features: Direct integration with Siri, drag & drop for iPad, and link detection for third-party apps. This update also provides full compatibility with iOS 11 and watchOS 4. Let’s take a look at how these new features work.

Siri & Things

In iOS 11, Things is directly integrated with Siri. We emphasize “direct” because we’ve actually had a Siri-to-Things feature for years – but it has been using the Reminders app as a go-between. With Things 3.2, you can now speak directly with Things – it’s an entirely new way to interact with your task manager.

You can speak naturally when using Things, making requests in two general categories: creating tasks and viewing lists.

Creating tasks is quite easy. Here are a few examples:

You can include a date or time:

You can add a task directly to a list:

You can also view any list. Simply refer to your projects or areas by name (or part of their name).

This also works great for tags. So when you’re running errands in town, say:

You can even query the Upcoming list to see how your week is looking:

Siri saves you from having to type, and makes task management with Things effortless.

Drag & Drop

Our second feature for iOS 11 is drag and drop for iPad. It allows you to drop content into Things from other apps – either as new to-dos, or into the notes of existing to-dos.

For example, you might want to link to emails you need to get back to later. Simply drag the email with your finger – from Mail into Things – and let go. The new to-do will include a link to the email so you can easily open it later:

To add something to an existing to-do, simply open the to-do first and then drop the dragged content into its notes. For example, you might want to add a series of links while researching something:

Third-Party App Links

Finally, Things 3.2 delivers one of your most-requested features: support for third-party app links! In the past, if you created a link to another app, such as Ulysses, you would see a string of text like this:

ulysses://x-callback-url/open?id=imkX-yOF9WgAT5pNg0P7Pw

The problem was, Things didn’t know this was a link to a file in Ulysses, so it just displayed it as plain text. But in 3.2, Things now understands that it’s a link and makes it tappable for you:

This feature makes it possible to reference files from a myriad of other apps and then access them later with a quick tap. We haven’t tested it with every app, so if you notice any links that don’t work as expected, please let us know.

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Things 3.2 is available now as a free update for all our users – we hope you enjoy the new features! Stand by for a Mac update on September 25th, which will bring full compatibility for macOS High Sierra.

Have a great and productive week!

Things 3.1 is out! It introduces repeating to-dos in projects, and improves the parsing and formatting of dates in many languages.

Repeating To-Dos in Projects

Since the release of Things 3, we’ve had loads of great feedback. One of the features requested the most is for repeating to-dos to also work inside of projects – and now they do! It’s great for long-term projects where you have daily or weekly tasks that need to be performed until your project is complete.

To support this feature we also had to upgrade Things Cloud, so make sure you update to 3.1 on all your devices to continue syncing.

The date parser is now fluent in 7 languages

Things’ natural date parser makes setting dates and times extremely easy. For example, it converts relative terms like “in 5 weeks” or “in 35 days” into a precise date like “August 7”.

In 3.1, the parser is now fully aware of your device’s Language & Region settings. If your system is set to a language Things is localized in, it not only understands what you type, e.g. “15 jours”, “15 días”, or “15 Tage”, but it also presents the calculated date properly formatted: “lun. 17 juil.”, “lun, 17 jul”, “Mo. 17. Juli”, etc.

Finally, this update also adds full support for both parsing and displaying dates in Japanese. 楽しんで!

Things 3.1 is available now for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch.