For Things users who sync with their iPhone or iPod touch, the ability to sync Areas of Responsibility has been the most requested feature. We are happy to announce that Things 1.3.5 for iPhone and iPod touch now supports that. Tasks on your iPhone or iPod touch will now be nicely categorized into Areas just as they are on your Mac. In version 1.3.5, however, it is not yet possible to add new Areas.
The overarching goal for version 1.3.5 was to significantly improve sync reliability and experience. But we also added important general improvements. The most important one being Things’ ability to more accurately return back to the last screen that was shown before you quit the application. This might seem like a little improvement, but it is actually quite significant, since it solves the problem of potentially losing vital text when a phone call comes in. Previously, when you were typing away on a note and a phone call came in, you lost the recent changes of that note. Now, after you open Things again, it will return to the editing screen with your latest changes waiting for you.
When returning back to Things, it doesn’t always make sense to show the last screen you were using before you exited. You might have forgotten exactly what you did last time. Instead of making the user always navigate back through potentially deep hierarchies, we tried to find a middle ground. For example, let’s consider a scenario where a user is managing tags while editing a to-do, and then quits the app. In such a case, we do not return to the Manage Tags screen, but instead show the to-do the user was editing before.
Most of the time and effort we spent on version 1.3.5 went into analyzing user contributed bug reports, doing our own extensive testing, and obviously fixing all of the issues we were able to reproduce. This involved both Things 1.1 and Things touch 1.3.5. If you are syncing with your iPhone or iPod touch, please make sure you use the latest version of both apps to get all of the benefits of the improved sync engine.
We strongly encourage every user who still experiences sync issues to contact technical support. The best way to do this is by selecting the “Provide Things Feedback...” menu item from Things’ main menu. This will open our new unified support form in your browser with version information already filled in for you.
Speaking of technical support... Let me take this opportunity to officially thank our new support hero, Mark Simoneau. He did an awesome job before as one of our forum moderators and we are very happy to have him helping us with our increased support load. He will be assisting Oli and Michael who worked crazy hours to answer all your questions.