We’ve just released Things 3.7 for Mac. It has only one new feature, but the difference is night and day.
Things’ appearance now automatically adapts to your environment in macOS Mojave, with a finely tuned Dark Mode that looks absolutely stunning.
We love the new look so much that we’ve made it an option even when Mojave’s in Light Mode. And if you’ve got a Mac with an older OS, don’t worry – you get it, too! In Things, just go to View > Appearance to enable it.
Enjoy! 😎
Today’s update is packed with great new features for iOS 12 and watchOS 5 – including support for Siri Shortcuts, the Apple Watch Series 4 and the Siri watch face, Dynamic Notifications, Password AutoFill, and Landscape Mode for iPhone. Let’s dive in!
The biggest new feature in iOS 12 is Siri Shortcuts, a new technology that’s all about speeding up the things you do often. For Things, these shortcuts open up some exciting new avenues for productivity, and we’d like to walk you through five different ways you can use them.
Siri can now learn your routines and begin suggesting things that you might want to do. For example, if you open your Today list every morning around 9 AM to look over your to-dos, Siri will eventually pick up on this – and the next morning at 9, you might be greeted with a new “Show Today” shortcut right on your Lock screen. Tap the shortcut, and you’re instantly brought to the right place within Things. It removes a little bit of friction, and feels surprisingly delightful when it happens.
If you do something repeatedly, Siri will suggest a shortcut on your Lock screen.
Things is great for collecting stuff you want to review and act on later, like remembering things you have to do around the house, groceries you need to buy, work tasks, and so on. When an idea hits you, you would normally open Things to enter it, maybe apply a tag or a date, and then select a list where it should go. Instead of doing these same steps over and over, you can now record a shortcut to speed things up.
In Things, go to Settings > Siri & Shortcuts > Add To-Do. Fill out everything that’s always the same for this particular type of to-do, then tap Add to Siri and speak your own phrase, like “new home improvement idea”.
Now the next time you want to jot something down, you can just say “new home improvement idea”, and you’ll be presented with a prefilled Quick Entry popover. All you need to do is enter the title and hit save!
Record a phrase to show a prefilled Quick Entry popover in Things.
Some of the things you do are always exactly the same. Say you travel a lot – you probably have a well-refined packing list you run through before every trip. Now, at the command of your voice, you can instantly create a to-do with that packing list.
Just go to Settings > Siri & Shortcuts > Add To-Do, and fill out everything you need in your to-do. Make sure Edit in Things is deselected so the to-do is created in the background, then tap Add to Siri and record a phrase, like “it’s travel time”.
When a new trip is coming up, just say: “Hey Siri, it’s travel time.” You’ve forgotten your socks for the last time 😀
Record a phrase to quickly create to-dos you need often.
If you have a specific list that you need to refer to often throughout the day, you can create a shortcut that quickly brings you there. Go to Settings > Siri & Shortcuts > Show List to record your custom voice phrase for it.
You can even set it up to filter that list when it opens. For example, “Hey Siri, show me today’s errands” can open your Today list and automatically filter it by your “Errands” tag.
Lastly – but for power users certainly not least – these shortcuts are integrated with Apple’s new Shortcuts app. What’s great about the Shortcuts app is that it allows you to pull actions together from multiple different apps into one powerful, multi-step workflow.
Matthew Cassinelli over at The Sweet Setup had an early go at creating shortcuts for Things and plans to share useful workflows he’s coming up with. We can’t wait to see the creative ways you’ll all put this to use!
When you get a notification from Things, tap the Snooze button and you’ll notice that you now have granular control over the duration of the snooze: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour.
The new options are revealed when you press the “Snooze” button.
Things supports iOS 12’s new Password AutoFill feature. It creates a strong password for you, keeps it safe, and automatically enters it for you when you log in on a new device. All of this now works with Things Cloud.
Turn your iPhone to the side, and behold – our shiny new landscape mode 🙃
We’ve also added full support for watchOS 5 and Apple Watch Series 4. You’ll notice Things now appears on the Siri watch face; it shows the next to-do from your Today list, and how many to-dos are left for the day.
For the Series 4, we’ve built four great new complications for the new Infograph watch faces.
Things 3.7 is available for download from the App Store now. We hope you enjoy these features!
Until we meet again. In the Mojave desert. At night. 😱
We have some big plans for Things and want to expand our team.
We’re currently looking for an iOS/macOS Developer and a Sync Engineer. If that sounds like you or someone you know, head over to our jobs page and learn more.
We’d love to hear from you!
Applications are open until September 16.
We’ve just released an amazing update for iPad. With full support for external keyboards, powerful shortcuts, Type Travel navigation, and much more – Things 3.6 takes our iPad app to the next level. Try it today!
For this update we had one goal: make our iPad app truly desktop-class. To achieve this, we had to substantially improve support for external keyboards – and by that we don’t just mean adding a few more shortcuts. In fact, adding more shortcuts was only possible because of one of the key features in this release: the ability to select items from the keyboard.
The lists you make in Things are constantly changing, so editing them has to be easy. Over the years, we’ve worked hard to make this feel as frictionless as possible on touch devices: insert items anywhere with the Magic Plus button, select items quickly with a left swipe, multi-select items by swiping down the circles on the right, and reorder items (even a multi-selection) via drag and drop.
The easy-ness of these list editing controls on iOS is something we’re proud of. But as soon as you attach a keyboard to your iPad, all that magic goes away. Almost every list editing action requires you to lift your hand off the keyboard and touch the screen, which gets exhausting.
This problem can’t be fixed by “just adding keyboard shortcuts”, because shortcuts require context: Where do you want to insert a new to-do? Which items do you want to move? And so on. Before you can use a shortcut, you need a persistent selection in the list that you can target. So that’s exactly what we’ve built for Things 3.6.
To see what we mean, just open the app and tap the down arrow; you’ll see the first to-do selected. Now you can move the selection around with the arrow keys, or hold down shift and use the arrows to select more to-dos. Yes, it works just like the Mac!
One of the beautiful things about the way it works on iPad is how keyboard and touch controls work together seamlessly. You can start selecting to-dos with your keyboard, then tap a few with your finger to add some more, and so on – it just feels natural.
Now that you have a selection in the list, there are all sorts of things you can do. Even with a small handful of shortcuts, you already have a lot of power:
These shortcuts are all very straightforward – chances are you already know most of them. And if you’re a shortcut-enthusiast we have good news! We’ve added over 70 shortcuts across the app. Press and hold the ⌘ Cmd key in any view to see what’s possible, or check out the full list on our website.
You’ll notice that popovers in Things are also fully accessible from the keyboard (When, Deadline, Tags, etc.). Open a popover, such as ⌘ Cmd+ S, then use the arrow keys to move your selection around. Better yet, just start typing in any of them to filter down the results!
Quick side note: Apple’s Smart Keyboard for iPad doesn’t have an Esc key 😱 So how do you get out of popovers? Well there’s a system-wide shortcut for this: ⌘ Cmd+. – and it also works in Things.
There’s a really cool feature we built for the Mac, called Type Travel. It allows you to navigate Things with your keyboard. You don’t need a shortcut to use it – just start typing where in the app you want to go, and instantly you’re transported there. It’s magic. We’ve now brought this feature to iPad, and it really shines here. It’s amazing how quickly you can get around without even lifting a hand.
To polish it all off, we’ve built three long-standing feature requests into this release:
After taking this update for a spin, we think you’ll agree: using Things on iPad feels completely different now. That “I’ll just wait till I get back to my Mac to do serious work” feeling is replaced with a feeling of empowerment: almost anything you could do in Things on your Mac, you can now do on your iPad.
So grab your keyboard, head on down to the coffee shop, and see what you can do with Things 3.6 – we hope you’ll like it!