This is our big fall update for iOS 15. It’s packed with great improvements, including two new widgets for iPad, widget customization, support for Live Text, and much more! Available now in Things 3.15 for iPhone and iPad.

Two New XL Widgets for iPad

We’ve added two new extra-large widgets for the iPad’s big screen, and they’re delightful:

1. The first, called “Up Next”, helps you stay on top of your schedule. It shows your to-dos for Today, Tomorrow, and the two days after that.
2. The second is the extra-large “List” widget. It shows a single list, but in two columns so you can see more to-dos at a glance.

Widget Customization

Things’ widgets have proven super popular. Many of you have written in to say you’d like more customization options, so we’ve added two improvements that we think you’ll enjoy:

1. Plus Button Behavior. By default, the + button saves a new to-do to your Inbox. You can now change this to the currently-displayed list. Simply tap and hold the widget, choose Edit, and change the “Plus Button” setting. You can also hide the button entirely.
2. Custom Themes. By default, Things’ widgets follow the system’s light/dark setting, but many of you told us that you prefer your widgets to be always dark or always light. You can now control this behavior in Things → Settings → Appearance. We’ve also added a beautiful Black theme.

Live Text

There are many ways to quickly get content into Things – via the Share extension, Quick Entry, Siri, Mail to Things, and more. Today a new option called Live Text is added to the list, and it’s awesome! It lets you capture text simply by pointing your iPhone’s camera at it.

Try it out: Open a to-do, tap in the notes field, tap again to bring up the menu, and activate Live Text. Now point your camera at some text and voila! It automagically appears in your to-do. ✨

Improved Notifications

iOS 15 provides more ways to control your notifications and there are two improvements for Things:

• Announce Notifications. If you receive a text message while wearing headphones or driving in your car, Siri will read it to you. This now also works for reminders you’ve set in Things. You can enable this feature in iOS Settings → Things → Notifications.
• Time-Sensitive Notifications. iOS 15 introduces a new feature called Focus that cuts out distracting notifications. Since notifications from Things are time-sensitive, we’ve made sure they can still get through. You’ll be prompted to allow this when your first notification is delivered.

Shortcuts Work Across iPhone and iPad

If you’ve been using Things with Apple’s Shortcuts you’ll know that actions created on the iPhone don’t work on the iPad (and vice versa) without a complicated workaround. We’re happy to report that once you upgrade to iOS 15, this limitation is gone. 🎉 Simply add a Things action to a shortcut from either device and it will work everywhere.

Great External Keyboard Support for iPad

Things has had outstanding support for external keyboards for a while. The app is fully navigable from your keyboard, and there are many powerful shortcuts. With iPadOS 15, it gets even better:

• Keyboard shortcuts are now neatly structured into menus. Simply hold down the ⌘ Cmd key to see what’s possible.
• While in Split View, Things can now show if it has keyboard focus. Certain elements in Things will dim when it doesn’t have focus, and brighten when it does.
• There’s a handy new shortcut: with a to-do selected, hit ^ Ctrl Return to bring up the context menu. You can then navigate the options with your arrow keys.

And More

• Support for the new Apple Watch Series 7.
• If you have an Apple Watch with an always-on display, Things will now stay visible when you lower your wrist and nicely dim the screen’s contents.
• We’ve added support for the iPad’s new Quick Note feature. Invoke Quick Note while viewing a list in Things and you’ll see an option to link to that list.
• If your iPhone or iPad is locked and you swipe right to reveal your widgets, your to-dos are now redacted for privacy.

---

Things 3.15 is available now for iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. We hope you enjoy these great new features!

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.

macOS 11 Big Sur is here and Things is ready to go, with great new Widgets, Rich Notifications, and design tweaks to make Things look just right. Today’s release also brings full support for new Macs with Apple Silicon chips ✨

The New Widgets

The powerful new widgets that recently came to iOS are now available on your Mac, giving instant access to your most important lists. You can add as many as you want.

To set them up, swipe the Notification Center in from the right side of your screen. The default widget will show your Today list, but you can configure it to show any list you like: right-click the widget and choose Edit Things to flip it over.

You’ll notice that you can also use tags to filter the list you’ve chosen. This is useful if you want to focus on particular types of to-dos, such as Errands you need to run, Work items, and so on.

Rich Notifications

Notifications are so much better now.

Before, you could only snooze an alert for 10 minutes, but now you can choose how long: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour. There’s also an option to complete your to-do directly from the alert. Perhaps best of all, the app no longer jumps to the foreground when you hit snooze! 🙃

Apple Silicon

Apple has announced three brand new Macs running on their very own Apple M1 chips – a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. As of today’s release – 3.13.2 – Things fully supports the new architecture in these machines.

---

This update is available now for download on the App Store. We hope you enjoy it!

We’ve got a big update for you today with a magnificent new feature: Widgets for your Home Screen! Things 3.13 also brings Scribble support for iPad, new Complications for Apple Watch, and more.

Widgets on your Home Screen

For Things, the greatest new feature in iOS 14 is Home Screen Widgets: customizable tiles that show you pertinent information at a glance.

Available in three different sizes, Things’ widgets can be dropped directly onto your Home Screen where you can configure them to show any to-do list you want. Quickly see what you’re doing Today, glance at what’s due Tomorrow, stay on top of your most urgent project, view tag-filtered lists – it’s amazing how flexible they are. And aren’t they cute? 😊

You can add as many Things widgets as you want, intermingle them with widgets from other apps, stack them on top of each other and flick through them with your thumb. We’ve fallen in love with these things. We hope you like them too!

For information on how to set up Widgets, see Apple’s guides for iPhone and iPad.

Scribble on your iPad

For iPad users we’ve also added support for the Apple Pencil’s new Scribble feature. (iPadOS 14 currently supports scribbling in English and Chinese.) This means you can write inside of Things, as you would on paper, and it’ll convert your handwriting into typed text ✨ Just open Things and start scribbling!

Scribble in any open space to insert a to-do, or scribble into a field where you would normally type, like a project’s notes or a to-do’s checklist.

New Complications for Apple Watch

We've got some nice improvements for the Apple Watch today.

There’s a new + complication that lets you add new to-dos directly from your watch face. The Modular watch faces can now show the top 3 items from your Today list. And the Siri watch face now shows your upcoming reminders.

And more...

• Wind Down As bedtime draws near, your iPhone can suggest some things to do before you sleep. Apple calls this process “Wind Down”. For example, you might have shortcuts to put on some relaxing music, jot down your thoughts in a journaling app, and then hop into Things to review tomorrow’s to-dos. Head over to your Health app to set this up.
• Shortcuts In the Shortcuts app on iPhone & iPad, you can now select one of your tags in the Show List action.
• Notes We’ve improved the way notes in your projects and to-dos are synced. As a result, you can also write longer notes.

---

Things 3.13 is available for download now on iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad. We hope you enjoy it!