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.

Today we are happy to announce the release of Things 2 for Mac, iPad, and iPhone - a free update for all existing users. And we are introducing a new service, Things Cloud, which keeps your to-dos updated across all your devices - also for free.

Before going into what's new, I'd like to put today's releases into perspective:

Today is a big day in Things' history. It sees major updates for all our clients, as well as the long awaited Things Cloud release. Many of you have been looking forward to this, and I want to thank you for your patience. We have been working hard on these updates and we are truly excited to be releasing them today.

Things Cloud

Things Cloud stores your to-dos and automatically keeps them updated across all your devices. All you have to do is turn it on in the Settings and create a free Things Cloud account. It's that simple. You can read more about Things Cloud and how it works on its product page.

When we set out to build Things Cloud, we wanted it to be fast, robust, and scalable. There's no way to achieve that, of course, without doing extensive, real world tests. So a little over a year ago, we started inviting our users to our Things Cloud beta. We then extended the beta by making it publicly available to everyone 6 months ago. During all this time, we kept enhancing and improving both Things Cloud and our client applications. By now, more than 30,000 beta testers are using it on a daily basis, and the feedback we get is phenomenal - our users love it.

We are excited to finally drop the “beta” from Things Cloud. It has been thoroughly tested, and it's ready for prime time.

Please note: Things Cloud supersedes the old sync mechanism. If you rely on Bonjour Sync and absolutely must use it, please read this article.

Things 2 for Mac

Things 2 for Mac includes many new features. Foremost is the seamless Things Cloud integration. We haven’t just bolted Things Cloud support on top of the existing Mac code – we've actually rewritten Things’ core so it fits perfectly with the design of Things Cloud. The results speak for themselves: a nimble solution that does its job so quickly, you'll hardly even notice it's there.

The second major feature is the new "Daily Review" list - this maybe needs a little explanation. Previously, whenever a to-do would become due, or if it was scheduled for today, Things would automatically move that to-do to your Today list. This way, you would never accidentally miss it - but it also had drawbacks. Many of you told us that you don't want Things to interfere with your carefully pre-arranged Today list. Just because you decided two weeks ago to schedule something for today doesn't mean you actually want to do it, well, today. After all, priorities can change. What’s worse, there was no way to distinguish the items you had manually placed inside your Today list from the ones Things would automatically move there.

Things 2 solves this problem. Now, all due and scheduled to-dos appear in a special Daily Review section at the top of your Today list.

From there, you can quickly decide which items you want to start today , and which ones you want to postpone for later . To start or postpone them all, simply use the buttons in the top right corner.

Things 2 also includes many other improvements and refinements: It now has a full screen mode, we've reduced the window chrome significantly so it looks great on Mountain Lion, the app is fully sandboxed for the Mac App Store, and it offers a streamlined Reminders integration which makes it very easy to use Siri for entering tasks into Things. Things 2 is also fully optimized for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Things 2 for iOS

Just like the Mac version, both Things 2 for iPhone and Things 2 for iPad have support for Things Cloud, as well as the new Daily Review list. But there is more.

First, the iPhone version gets some visual polish throughout the entire app. Here are a few examples:

Second, we have built a completely new Scrolling Date Picker for selecting dates in Things. While the default iOS date picker is great for picking arbitrary dates, it falls short when all you want to do is select a date in the upcoming weeks - something you do all the time in a task manager. Even the Calendar app is not ideal, since selecting dates across months feels a whole lot heavier than it should - time is linear after all, and there's no reason to introduce artificial month boundaries. With our new Scrolling Date Picker, the next few weeks are always just a tap away. And everything beyond, just a scroll:

On the iPhone, you can turn the picker sideways to see calendar weeks. And in the Settings, you can choose your preferred first day of the week if you don't like the OS default.

Finally, Things 2 brings some often-requested improvements for iOS: you can now cancel a todo by tapping and holding its checkbox, you can tell Things to log completed to-dos automatically after you check them off, and lastly, we have greatly improved the accessibility of Things when using VoiceOver.

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We hope you will enjoy today's releases. Please download the new versions of Things, give them a spin, and tell us what you think. We're excited to hear from you.

We have just released new versions of our Things Cloud beta apps. These updates will allow you to import your to-dos from the regular version of Things into the beta.

If you haven’t done so already, now is a great time to try our Things Cloud beta for yourself. All the data you import and enter during the beta will continue to be available once the final version of Things Cloud is released.

How to Import Your To-Dos

1. First, update your beta apps to the newest versions on all platforms.
2. Now use either your Mac or iOS device to import your data. On the Mac, go to File → Import Database… and follow the on-screen instructions. On iOS, make sure that beta mode is enabled, then go into Settings and tap Import Regular Database.

For more detailed guidance on the import process, please view this page.

Today, the Things Cloud beta goes public – an invitation is no longer required. If you're interested in trying it out, just visit the page below and follow the instructions:

Since we announced the beta, more than 35,000 people have signed up to become test pilots. Over the past months, we’ve gradually been inviting more and more people. Today, we sent out the final batch of invitations. All applicants now have access to the beta on both Mac & iOS.

Our next milestone is to enable the import of existing databases into the beta. Until then the beta continues to use an extra database, leaving users’ existing data untouched.

We’ve had incredible feedback from our users, telling us that Things Cloud is proving to be both fast and stable. Some of our users have adopted the beta entirely and created exceptionally large databases. In the coming weeks we are going to work out some kinks and performance bottlenecks related to such large databases. This is an important final step towards enabling the import of existing data. Once the import feature is ready, we’ll post another update.

Thank you all for your continued support, and for your help in testing Things Cloud.