If it is not just a different “form factor”, if it is not just old software with the “touch experience” added, then what is it? What makes the iPad so special we just had to develop Things for iPad?

For sure, the introduction of the iPad today marks the arrival of a new platform. And there is hardly anything more exciting for a software developer than the introduction of a new platform. But this isn’t just any platform.

If you want to understand what makes the iPad special, you cannot look at what it has, but what it doesn’t have. The iPad is so thin and light, it becomes the display, and the display becomes the application. No input devices. The device vanishes and turns into the application you are using. The technology is transparent.

Steve Jobs said about the iPod that “it is all about the music”. With the iPad, Apple has done the same for personal computing as it has done before with the iPod: it made technology go away. But if the device is gone, and the operating system is gone, what is left?

The iPad is an empty canvas that invites us to imagine what is possible. It inspires our imagination and it makes us want to create, because never before were we able to create software that was so close to the user.

Developing Things for iPad in such a short amount of time was exciting, it was hard work, and it was a whole lot of fun. You can see how much fun we had by watching the Things for iPad introduction video. Please enjoy it.

Today we released Things 1.3.2. Despite the version number saying that it is only a minor update, it actually contains a significantly enhanced sync engine.

With Things 1.3.2, it is now possible to sync an arbitrary number of mobile devices with your Mac such as the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad via your local network. The Devices preference pane (previously called iPhone) will guide you through the necessary steps to add multiple devices.

Once you start a sync session by choosing the "Sync Mobile Devices now…" menu command (or by simply opening Things on one of your mobile devices), Things will look for all available devices and sync all of your information between all of them.

For example, if you made changes on both your iPhone and your iPad, Things 1.3.2 will sync with your iPhone, then your iPad, and once again with your iPhone to make sure changes are not only passed from your iPhone to your iPad, but also back again from your iPad to your iPhone.

Finally, for those of you who are wondering about cloud sync. We have chosen a quite ambitious approach using cool technology that only recently has become feasible. We are (still) very hard at work to get this completed and released, and I want to thank everybody for their patience. It'll be worth the wait.

Today we released an update to Things for the iPhone and iPod touch that introduces global search and enables landscape support. The latter can be turned off in the settings.

Due to the space constraints on the iPhone, not all of our screens fit into landscape so we had to be creative. One example is the due date picker. In portrait, it looks like this:

In landscape, however, the date picker is too tall and doesn't fit on the screen together with the two information lines. We solved this problem by moving the picker down one level in the hierarchy - but only in landscape mode:

There are also many bug fixes and improvements in this release, a list of which can be found here. Among them is a significantly faster sync process that compresses the tasks before sending them between the devices. An update for Things Mac that enables this feature is currently getting the finishing touches and will be available shortly. In preparation for the iPad launch, the new Mac version will also gain the ability to sync multiple mobile devices at the same time.

Originally, we planned for the 1.4 release to also include repeating tasks. By now, we have them fully implemented in TT and already sent out a few beta versions to our testers. The main remaining work is ensuring that repeating tasks sync reliably with the Mac. This is quite involved and requires updating and migrating Things Mac to use our new recurrence rule engine. Work on this is still ongoing and we didn't want to hold back all the other improvements of 1.4 until they are completed. This is why we released TT 1.4 without repeating tasks for now. Once they are completed, we will add them in the next major update.

Finally, if you've seen our new "About" page or our most recent blog post, you will have noticed that our team has grown quite a bit over the last year. In addition to the people you see in the caricatures, we also had the pleasure of having two very talented young programmers as interns: Devin Lane and Kent Sutherland. Kent (whom you may know from his iChat add-on Chax) has written large parts of the code from this release and I want to thank him for his excellent work.

I would like to take today’s releases as an opportunity to speak a little bit about new arrivals: the new releases that arrived today, our projects that will come to fruition in the next weeks and months, and some of the people behind them who arrived during the course of 2009. Let’s begin with the most recent.

Today we released Things 1.3 for Mac as a free update. Along with it goes a compatibility update, Things touch 1.3.13, our iPhone and iPod touch version of Things. The latter can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store, while the Mac version can be brought to version 1.3 by simply choosing “Check for Updates...” from the Things menu.

Things 1.3 is the first in a series of many more major releases that we will be making available throughout the year. We have gotten ourselves quite busy these days as witnessed by our new “Arrivals” status page. The arrivals page is really an experiment. Many people where asking for more frequent updates on what we are currently working on. But neither this blog nor our Twitter feed seemed to be the right place to mention technical details about the status of our various projects. The arrivals page is our take at a solution to this problem (and has partially inspired other developers, too.) The arrivals page has an associated RSS feed that has already been updated a couple of times since its launch.

Not only have we taken on quite a few projects, long time followers might have also noticed a few names appearing on the status page that haven’t been mentioned on this blog before. During the past year we have been quite busy extending our team with great people. The first to join us after Michael Simmons was Chris Kau, who is now sharing his prior management and engineering experience with us. Then came Andreas Linde, well-known from his successful iPhone app “WorldView”. He is working on iPhone OS related stuff and cloud sync. We already dedicated a blog post (even an entire release) to Bartek Bargiel. Last, but certainly not least, there is Roman Koellges, who is doing an awesome job with technical support and QA.

Finally, one other arrival that is approaching very quickly is the iPad version of Things. We’ll have more to share with you about it once April 3rd gets closer, so stay tuned. :)