Quick Entry and Autofill

In Things, you can use the Quick Entry entry dialog to quickly add new to-dos to your library while you are working inside another application. There are two variants of the Quick Entry dialog and you can specify a system-wide keyboard shortcut for each of them in the General pane of the Things preferences:

The default shortcuts are Control-Space and Control-Option-Space, but you can change them to anything you like by clicking into the appropriate field and then pressing the key combination you prefer.

Using the default shortcuts as an example, here's some information about how the Quick Entry dialog works:

If you press Control-Space in any application, an empty Quick Entry dialog appears where you can specify the title, tags, notes, and due date of a todo, as well as its target location (e.g. the Inbox).

If you press Control-Option-Space, a slightly more involved process is triggered: Things checks whether you have a text selection in the currently active application. If you do, it then copies over that text into the notes of the newly created todo. Also, Things tries to detect important information about where the new todo originated. For example, if you are in Safari while invoking the shortcut, Things will add a link to the current URL into the notes. Or, if you have an email message selected in Mail.app while invoking the shortcut, it will also add a link to that message into the notes.

Please note: After you launch Things 1.2 for the first time, you have to quit and restart all running applications for Autofill to work properly (you can also log out and then log back in to your account again to achieve the same effect). The reason for this is that Things uses the OS X Services to get to the currently selected text and OS X only updates the Services for a given application at launch time. Also, note that for applications which do not support AppleScript, Autofill will not be able to detect the current URL or opened document.