Six months have passed since the release of Things Cloud. Our users have now created over 150 million to-dos, requiring the service to handle up to 7,200 transactions per minute.

During this period, Things Cloud has performed admirably. It’s had only two minor hiccups with less than 3 hours of interruption, and only for a small portion of our users. That’s an uptime of 99.9%.

We get an awful lot of feedback from users praising the speed and reliability of Things Cloud; some even say it’s the best experience they’ve had with a cloud service.

For us, and for our users, it has been an incredible success. We couldn’t be happier with how things are going.

New Status Indicator

Like all cloud services, Things Cloud is an ever-changing landscape; it’s always taking on new users and more data as it becomes increasingly active.

If we should ever run into any kind of issues, it would be great to have an easy way to communicate the status of the service – so we’ve placed a new status indicator at the top of our redesigned Status Board:

In addition to showing the current state of Things Cloud, it shows historic information about the service over the past 7 days – and also provides a place for users to report any problems as they arise. If problems do occur, we’ll change the status for minor hiccups or major outages.

Of course, we plan to continue on the success of our last six months, and hope that the status indicator sees very little action indeed.

Update: This sale has now ended. For one week only, Things Mac is on sale for an incredibly great price.

As the new year gets into full swing, the Mac App Store is holding a Get Stuff Done sale. It starts today, and you can get Things Mac for a whopping 50% off the normal price.

Download on the Mac App Store

This sale runs from January 24-31. If you've been holding out on getting Things for your Mac, this is a wonderful opportunity.

Things for Mac also updates seamlessly with Things for iPad and Things for iPhone via our free Things Cloud service.

We've just released Things 2.1 for iPhone, iPad and Mac. In addition to improvements for iOS 6 and the new iPhone 5, these updates bring Reminders & Siri integration to our iOS apps for the first time.

Reminders & Siri on iOS 6

If you are running iOS 6, you can now easily enter new to-dos via Siri. Here's how:

1. In Things, enable "Reminders & Siri" integration from within Settings.

   

2. Use Siri on your iPhone or iPad to enter new reminders. For example, you could say "Remember to send the job application".

   

3. Your reminders will now show up in your Things Inbox, from where you can easily import them.

   

It's that simple.

There are a few additional options which allow you to configure which types of reminders will show inside Things. For more information, see this page.

Reminders & Siri on OS X Mountain Lion

We've also updated the Mac version of Things to include the same Reminders settings as on iOS. For this, we had to use a new way of accessing reminders that is only available in OS X Mountain Lion. For older versions of OS X, Things still shows the old "iCal" preference pane. Here's what the new preference pane looks like:

We recommend that you set up both your Mac and iOS versions of Things to show the same Reminders list. This way, your Inbox badge will show the same number on all your devices.

Please note that we've also removed the option to export your Today list to Reminders on OS X Mountain Lion. You can read more about that here.

iPhone 5

Things has also been adjusted to take advantage of the taller iPhone 5 screen. Here is what it looks like:

Things running on an iPhone 5. When adding new tasks, the title, notes, tags, and due date are now shown right away.

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We hope you find the new integration with Reminders & Siri useful, and we'd love to hear what you think!

It’s been two weeks since the public launch of Things Cloud. We’d like to give you a quick status update, and tell you about a nice little feature we’re releasing today – we call it Local Push.

100,000 Accounts

Interest in Things 2 and Things Cloud has been extraordinary. Since the launch, more than 4,000 people have been signing up for a new Things Cloud account every day. We’re very pleased with the performance of the service; in two weeks it scaled past 100,000 accounts gracefully, and continues to grow at a steady pace.

Things also became Editors' Choice on the Mac App Store and the top-grossing third-party app in the US — and more than 7,000 inquiries have come through our support channels since launch.

As you can imagine, all of this has left us very busy. If you’ve written to us and have not yet received a reply, we apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience – we will eventually reply to you all.

Local Push

Local Push is a little feature that didn't quite make it into our Things 2.0 release. We’re releasing it today with Things for iOS 2.0.1, and we’d like to tell you how it works.

Our Things apps are designed to update with Things Cloud often and automatically, so that you never have to trigger an update yourself. For example, updates are triggered when you check off a task, when you add a new one, when you switch to the app, and so forth. This ensures that Things Cloud and your devices are always up to date.

There is one use case, however, which is not covered by these triggers. When you have Things open on your Mac and your iPhone at the same time, and you make a change on the Mac, that change is indeed sent to Things Cloud instantly — but your iPhone doesn’t know this update is available, so you won’t see it reflected on the device immediately.

That’s where Local Push comes in. Now, every time you make a change on one device, Things sends an encrypted notification of that change across your local network. All your other devices on the same local network pick this up and request the changes from Things Cloud.

In other words — you can have Things open on all your devices, make a change on one of them, and see that change applied on your other devices almost immediately. Here’s what it looks like:

Update your iOS apps to version 2.0.1 and try it out for yourself. Things Mac was updated to 2.0.1 on August 12 and already has Local Push built in.

We hope you enjoy these updates.

Local Push requires an internet connection and works only when all devices are connected to the same router/local network.