We’ve got a terrific update for you today, and it’s all about your notes. Four great new features go hand in hand to elevate your note-taking to a whole new level:
1. Bullet Lists
2. Markdown
3. Find in Text
4. Things Cloud “Fractus”
When you open a to-do, your notes take center stage. It’s where you capture any extra info you need to get the task done. While many of your notes will only be a line or two, some can grow quite long – with detailed plans, reference material, brainstorms, and so on.
The longer a note gets, the more important it becomes to have a way to structure it. That’s what today’s update is all about. It’s the biggest change we’ve made to notes since Things was first released, and we think you’re going to love it.
Let’s take a look at what’s new.
Bullet Lists
Things now supports bullet lists and they couldn’t be easier to use. Simply type - followed by a space. But wait, couldn’t you already
type bullets in your notes? Indeed, but now they get the treatment they deserve:
- Text that wraps to a new line is neatly indented.
- When you hit Return a new bullet is inserted; return again escapes the list.
- And you can now create nested lists!
To nest a list, simply insert spaces in front of a bullet. You’ll notice that the bullet lines up perfectly with the text on the previous line, as if by magic! Try it, it’s cool 🤓
In addition to using - for bullets, you can also type *, +, • or 1.. If you’ve already written
lists with any of these characters, there’s nothing you need to do – they’ll automatically look great when you update to 3.14.
Together, all of these little touches make working with bullets a pleasure, and they’re so much easier to read.
Markdown
As many of you requested, you can now use Markdown to structure and style your notes. 🎉
If you already know Markdown, go ahead and try it out. Things detects a wide range of commonly-used syntax and renders it in a unique blend of proportional and fixed-width fonts. It looks and feels great!
If you don’t know Markdown, here’s how it works. To emphasize a word, simply surround it with asterisks, like so: *emphasized*. Things will detect this and render the word in italics. If you remove the asterisks, it goes back to normal again. Here are a few more examples:
- Use two asterisks to make text **bold**.
- Use colons to ::highlight:: text.
- Insert a hash at the beginning of a line to make a # Heading.
Here’s how it looks in Things:
If you’re new to Markdown, this will all seem a bit quirky at first – but we encourage you to try it out! Many people love Markdown, and you might end up liking it, too.
To learn more, be sure to check out our Markdown Guide. We’ve also added many great keyboard shortcuts for Mac and iPad. On iOS, you can double-tap a word, then tap Aa and choose a style from the popover.
Find in Text
Things’ Quick Find feature does a great job of searching across all your lists. But sometimes you want to narrow the search to the note you’re writing, especially if it’s a long one. For this, we’ve added a new option called Find in Text.
Simply open a to-do and hit ⇧ Shift ⌘ Cmd F. On iOS, open the to-do and tap ••• → Find in Text.
Things Cloud “Fractus”
Last but not least, we’re happy to announce Things Cloud “Fractus” – a smart new method for syncing text.
Until now, each time you modified a note – say to insert or remove a few words – the entire note would be synced again across all your devices. With our new method, only the fragments of text you modify are synced. This drastically improves the speed and efficiency of the sync, and allows for smarter resolution of conflicts.
There’s nothing you need to do to enable this – we’ve already rolled it out.
We’ve been testing these features internally for a while now, and it’s hard to imagine writing our notes without them. We hope you enjoy this update, and look forward to hearing what you think!
Things 3.14 is available now as a free update for all our customers. Get it now for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.