macOS 11 Big Sur is here and Things is ready to go, with great new Widgets, Rich Notifications, and design tweaks to make Things look just right. Today’s release also brings full support for new Macs with Apple Silicon chips ✨

The New Widgets

The powerful new widgets that recently came to iOS are now available on your Mac, giving instant access to your most important lists. You can add as many as you want.

To set them up, swipe the Notification Center in from the right side of your screen. The default widget will show your Today list, but you can configure it to show any list you like: right-click the widget and choose Edit Things to flip it over.

You’ll notice that you can also use tags to filter the list you’ve chosen. This is useful if you want to focus on particular types of to-dos, such as Errands you need to run, Work items, and so on.

Rich Notifications

Notifications are so much better now.

Before, you could only snooze an alert for 10 minutes, but now you can choose how long: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour. There’s also an option to complete your to-do directly from the alert. Perhaps best of all, the app no longer jumps to the foreground when you hit snooze! 🙃

Apple Silicon

Apple has announced three brand new Macs running on their very own Apple M1 chips – a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. As of today’s release – 3.13.2 – Things fully supports the new architecture in these machines.

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This update is available now for download on the App Store. We hope you enjoy it!

We’ve got a big update for you today with a magnificent new feature: Widgets for your Home Screen! Things 3.13 also brings Scribble support for iPad, new Complications for Apple Watch, and more.

Widgets on your Home Screen

For Things, the greatest new feature in iOS 14 is Home Screen Widgets: customizable tiles that show you pertinent information at a glance.

Available in three different sizes, Things’ widgets can be dropped directly onto your Home Screen where you can configure them to show any to-do list you want. Quickly see what you’re doing Today, glance at what’s due Tomorrow, stay on top of your most urgent project, view tag-filtered lists – it’s amazing how flexible they are. And aren’t they cute? 😊

You can add as many Things widgets as you want, intermingle them with widgets from other apps, stack them on top of each other and flick through them with your thumb. We’ve fallen in love with these things. We hope you like them too!

For information on how to set up Widgets, see Apple’s guides for iPhone and iPad.

Scribble on your iPad

For iPad users we’ve also added support for the Apple Pencil’s new Scribble feature. (iPadOS 14 currently supports scribbling in English and Chinese.) This means you can write inside of Things, as you would on paper, and it’ll convert your handwriting into typed text ✨ Just open Things and start scribbling!

Scribble in any open space to insert a to-do, or scribble into a field where you would normally type, like a project’s notes or a to-do’s checklist.

New Complications for Apple Watch

We've got some nice improvements for the Apple Watch today.

There’s a new + complication that lets you add new to-dos directly from your watch face. The Modular watch faces can now show the top 3 items from your Today list. And the Siri watch face now shows your upcoming reminders.

And more...

• Wind Down As bedtime draws near, your iPhone can suggest some things to do before you sleep. Apple calls this process “Wind Down”. For example, you might have shortcuts to put on some relaxing music, jot down your thoughts in a journaling app, and then hop into Things to review tomorrow’s to-dos. Head over to your Health app to set this up.
• Shortcuts In the Shortcuts app on iPhone & iPad, you can now select one of your tags in the Show List action.
• Notes We’ve improved the way notes in your projects and to-dos are synced. As a result, you can also write longer notes.

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Things 3.13 is available for download now on iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad. We hope you enjoy it!

It’s a big day for the iPad! Apple is shipping out their new Magic Keyboard, which for the first time includes a trackpad that lets you control an on-screen cursor. We’ve now updated Things with full support for it.

Apple surprised us all last month when they added cursor support to iPadOS. Even though apps get basic cursor support “out of the box”, there’s a lot developers can do to make the experience great. That’s what we’ve done for today’s release.

The good news is, this feature works with any Bluetooth trackpad or mouse, so if you’ve got one lying around you can play with it right now 🎉

The first thing you’ll notice when you connect your trackpad is that Things’ entire interface responds to the cursor. As you move it near a button, for example, or a to-do’s checkbox, it now magnetically “hops” into place and takes on the shape of whatever you’re clicking. It’s quite playful!

Of course, there are all the normal benefits you would expect from using a “mouse” – you can click, select, drag & drop, just like you would on a Mac – but it has also made a few other great features possible.

New features

Context menus everywhere. You can now right-click stuff! This will reveal context menus with powerful actions. To see what’s possible, right-click a to-do, project, or area. It also works for lists in the sidebar like Today or Upcoming.

Open a new window. New windows are now just a click away: right-click a list in your sidebar and you’ll find the option to Open in New Window. This puts Things into Split View so you can see your two lists side by side. To close one of the windows again, just hit Cmd + W.

Swipe gestures. As a touch-based app, Things for iPad has many great gestures available. We’ve now made these work for the trackpad as well; just swipe with two fingers. For example, swipe right on a to-do or project to schedule it, swipe left to enter selection mode, or swipe left within a to-do’s checklist to delete rows.

Selection tips

When it comes to selecting things, it’s worth mentioning a few tips:

• Clicking on a to-do will open it, just like when you tap with your finger. If instead you want to select the to-do, hold down Option when you click it.
• To select multiple items, hold down Cmd or Shift when you click. Or, while in multi-select mode, click and drag downward on the dots to the right.
• To deselect something, just click in an open space.

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Today’s update is all about the trackpad, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Things also has excellent keyboard support. The app’s entire interface is navigable at the touch of a key, and there are powerful shortcuts, too.

Together, the iPad, the Keyboard and the Mouse provide a truly wonderful experience for Things, and we can’t wait to hear what you think!

Since New Year, we’ve been working on a big update – and it’s all about modernizing Things for Apple Watch. All the app’s internal parts have been rebuilt, it now syncs directly with Things Cloud, and we’ve added some much-requested features!

Five Years On

We first created Things for Apple Watch five years ago, when watches were still slow and entirely dependent on your phone for connectivity. In order to get changes from your watch to the cloud, the iPhone app had to act as a middleman, ferrying changes to and from the cloud on the watch app’s behalf. While it seemed like a fine idea at the time, in practice it turned out to be slow and error-prone.

In the years since, the Apple Watch has come a long way. Devices are faster, have more storage, support background refresh, connect to WiFi, and many are free-roaming on LTE. Compared to 2015, it’s a huge leap forward.

In short, we knew that big improvements were possible for Things – and well overdue. So in January, we disassembled our watch app and began replacing all the parts: the sync, data layer, complication integrations, background refresh, Siri integration – everything under the hood is completely new. But without doubt, the biggest change today is the sync: we’ve brought Things Cloud to Apple Watch.

Things Cloud on the Watch

The most important change in this release is that Things on your watch will now sync directly with Things Cloud.

Syncing directly with Things Cloud is far superior to the previous implementation, and we couldn’t be more excited to get this into your hands.

Even when you’re away from your phone, the watch syncs instantly with the cloud and you can be confident that you’re always looking at the latest data.

When you enter a project, for example, or a to-do with a checklist, you’ll no longer have to wait for that content to load. Everything is already on your watch and ready to go.

We’ve also improved the quality of data on the watch face. Since both your phone and watch now sync to the cloud, we’re at liberty to choose whichever data is more recent and display that in your complication. After all, you want to be sure when you glance at your wrist that the info’s up to date ⌚️👀

Of course, all of this requires a Things Cloud account. If you don’t already have one, you can create one for free.

More New Features

Even though today’s update is mainly focused on the app’s foundation, we were able to sneak in a few of your most-requested features.

• Add to Today

  By default, the watch app saves new to-dos to your Inbox; you can now set Today as the default instead. To access this setting, open the watch app and force press in the main list.

• Remove from Today

  Many of you complained that there was no way to remove a to-do from Today – that is to say, put it in Anytime. You can now do this by tapping Clear in the date picker.

• Scribble support

  When adding new to-dos, or appending some notes, you can now scribble instead of speaking the text 👆

• Multiple watches

  Incidentally, the new implementation of sync brings another benefit: many of you wrote in saying you use a spare watch for sleep tracking and really missed having Things on it. Now you can!

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If you love your Apple Watch, we think you’ll love Things 3.12. The addition of Things Cloud makes a world of difference and we find ourselves using the app more than ever. Take it for a spin today and let us know what you think!