The new feature in Things 1.3 has become known to us internally as “Mixed Projects”. This feature is quite simple and once you have used it, it is hard to believe it hasn’t been there all along.

Previously, we required any given project to only contain items of the same type. This was a deliberate design decision, and one of the few we came to regret though. Still, it has shaped both the structure of the database and the logic that was implemented in both the Mac and the iPhone and iPod touch apps. No more. Having removed this restriction not only makes Things more flexible, it also prepares the ground for bigger things to come like cloud sync and other projects (“Troy”, I am looking at you). ;)

So what is new? Before Things 1.3, an active project, for example, could only contain next action steps. Of course, those would all show up in the Next list. Now, active projects can have someday and scheduled to-dos as well. Someday or scheduled items of active projects will not show up in Next, giving users the ability to add nice-to-have but not strictly required items to a projects, or to-dos that cannot be started until a certain date.

All scheduled to-dos, whether contained in a project or not, will appear in the Scheduled list, giving you the complete timeline of all to-dos that have a start date. Similarly for someday items in active projects. These will appear in the Someday list in a new collapsable section. To create someday and scheduled to-dos in active projects, simply use drag and drop or the commands from the “Items” menu.

When you cannot or do not want to continue working on a certain project, you can deactivate it, e.g., by moving it to the Someday list. Even if you do so, the project will retain its structure. Next time you’ll re-activate it, your previous choice of what should be a next action step, someday, or scheduled to-do will be preserved.

Inactive projects will be removed from the source list, but they will still appear both in the Someday list and the Projects list just as they always did. This way, projects you cannot do something about anyway, will no longer clutter up your source list. Similarly for to-dos contained in inactive projects, they will no longer appear in any list until the project is re-activated again.

After our recent Things 1.2 release, we got quite a bit of feedback on the new features. With today's release of Things 1.2.2, we attempt to address the most frequent requests and bug reports.

For example, you can now disable Spotlight indexing. We also made it possible to enable or disable either of the two Quick Entry keyboard shortcuts independently. With these new options, we needed to reorganize the General pane to keep Things' preferences simple and uncluttered:

To enhance consistency with the new autofill feature, we added the ability to drag multiple emails and also cards from Address Book into the notes section of a to-do. Autofill now also works with Microsoft Word 2008. Unfortunately we couldn't add support for Entourage or Evernote due to their lack of the necessary AppleScript support.

There are many other fixes and small improvements like better compatibility with Japanese input methods, better French localization, a keyboard shortcut reference directly accessible from the Help menu, and fixes to the plug-in syntax. Please refer to the release notes for a full list.

Bartek Bargiel is an amazing person. He - a professional Java developer - became interested in the Mac and decided to learn what developing for the Mac is like. Since he was interested in David Allen’s GTD methodology too, he created iGTD, his very own task management application. iGTD quickly became the most popular free GTD-style task management application for the Mac.

Early on, we were very impressed by what he did. Even though he had a demanding day job, he was doing this all on his spare time. Yet iGTD had more features than Things did! Imagine our surprise when we discovered that Bartek was working for a company in Stuttgart - the very city where our office is based! We had to meet him...

It turned out that Bartek was actually working remotely from Poland, so meeting him wasn’t that easy after all. However, he managed to stop by our office a few months later. The guy who would eventually step through our front door turned out to be one of the nicest, most likable people you could imagine.

But before we met in person, Bartek let us know that he liked Things so much that he switched to it as his main task management application. And that he also decided to stop developing iGTD and recommend Things to his users instead. (Insert sounds of heads exploding)

We were speechless. And I don’t mean this as a figure of speech. We were literally speechless. Of course we wanted him as a member of Cultured Code! When we finally met him, he told us that developing iGTD completely on his own had become somewhat of a burden and that he would much rather work together with a team. What a wonderful coincidence. We knew we wouldn't let him go, ever!

Bartek has since decided to quit his daytime job and come join us instead! Right now, he is in the process of helping his successor at his old company get up to speed.

So, I am very happy to finally be able to say this: Welcome Bartek! We are thrilled to have you!

Once it became apparent that Bartek would continue to work on Things instead of iGTD, we felt quite responsible for existing iGTD users. We asked Bartek what we needed to do to make Things a viable option for iGTD users. I'm pleased to say that Things 1.2 is the result of us taking his advice. He also requested that we give free Things licenses to everyone who donated to iGTD, and we were very happy to oblige! Everyone who donated will receive an email with one or more free Things licenses, making sure that the value of licenses will exceed the amount of money donated.

We are releasing our Things 1.2 “Welcome iGTD” update today. Our main goal for 1.2 was to bring keyboard support to a level iGTD power users would expect. One of the famous features pioneered by iGTD and subsequently copied by other task managers is the so-called “F-key trick”. For many supported applications, it allows you to quickly create a task with information already filled in for you. For example, in Safari, a task is created with a link to the currently viewed page added to the notes section of the to-do. With the help of Bartek, we have now integrated his F-key trick into our Quick Entry dialog.

For everyone interested in switching from iGTD to Things, Bartek also created an iGTD Importer you can use to transfer your data. You can download it from our Wiki.

Please also read the following article for more details on what is new in Things 1.2.

I’d like to close this article by thanking Bartek for all he already did for Things. He was instrumental for providing our AppleScript support in Things 1.1, making sure that everything was in place for the iGTD importer he has now provided for the 1.2 release. The Quicksilver, LaunchBar, and Google Search Bar plug-ins we released today are also his creation. Thank you Bartek!

If you are the kind of person who enjoys increasing productivity by optimizing your daily workflow — and you’re not afraid of learning one or two new keyboard shortcuts — then Things 1.2 is for you! Here is a quick overview of the new features:

We’ve added a powerful new way of adding tasks to Things from other applications - Quick Entry Autofill - along with many new shortcuts for editing and managing all of your tasks inside Things.

Things now also integrates with Spotlight and is fully localized into 6 languages: English, German, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Russian. Plus, with the upcoming release of Snow Leopard, we have also made sure that Things runs smoothly on the new OS.

Finally, we have added plug-ins for the most popular application launchers such as LaunchBar, Quicksilver, and Google Quick Search Box. Please refer to this wiki page for more details on how you can download and install them.

As always, you can read the full release notes in our wiki.

Quick Entry Autofill

Imagine the following scenario: You receive an email from a friend asking you to buy some items for his party. Previously, if you wanted to add that information to Things, you would invoke the Quick Entry dialog by pressing the system-wide keyboard shortcut. You would enter a task title and then copy over the items you need to buy for the party into the notes section. You might also want a link to the original email so you can reply to your friend once you’ve completed your errands. In this case you would have to drag and drop the email into the notes section as well. As you can see, this process is quite involved and cumbersome.

Wouldn’t it be great if Things just recognized the application you’re in and tried to extract the most useful information for you? This is exactly what Quick Entry Autofill does! Originally, Bartek invented this feature for iGTD and called it the “F-Key trick”. With his help, we have now implemented an even better version of it for Things.

If you go to the Things application preferences, you can see that there is now a second system-wide keyboard shortcut you can specify:

Of course, you can fully customize this shortcut.

Now, let’s return to our example. If you select the text that contains your friend’s errands inside his email and invoke the Quick Entry Autofill keyboard shortcut, Things will automatically extract the selected text and pre-populate the Quick Entry window with both the text and a link to the original email!

The Quick Entry Autofill feature behaves similarly in many other applications: it copies the currently selected text into the notes of the to-do and adds a link that is useful in the current context. Here are some examples: In Safari, it will automatically add the URL of the current page. In Finder, it will create links to currently selected files. And in Pages, it will create a link to the currently edited document.

Please note: After you launch Things 1.2 for the first time, you have to quit and restart all running applications for Autofill to work properly (you can also log out and then log back in to your account again to achieve the same effect). The reason is that Things uses Mac OS X Services to get the currently selected text and Mac OS X only updates Services for a given application at launch time. Also, note that for applications which do not support AppleScript (for example, Firefox), Autofill will not be able to detect the current URL or opened document.

UPDATE: Firefox actually does support AppleScript. Jesse Ruderman from Mozilla kindly helped us add autofill support for Firefox 3.x to Things 1.2.1, which is now available.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Let’s look at three examples. For a full list of shortcuts check out our keyboard shortcut overview (PDF).

1. If you select a task and then press Command-Up or Command-Down, it will move the task up or down in the current list. If you also hold down the Option key, it will move the selected task to the first or last position.
2. Filtering by tags is now also accessible from the keyboard. Let’s say you have a tag “home”, and you have specified “h” as the shortcut for this tag. In this case, pressing Control-h in a given list will filter it by that tag. Pressing Control-h a second time will remove the filter and show all tasks again.
3. If you want to modify either the due date or the start date (Scheduled list), you can now do that via the keyboard, too. In the Scheduled list, postponing a scheduled item for one more day can be achieved by pressing Control-] on a US keyboard, whereas Control-[ subtracts one day from the scheduled date. If you also hold down the Shift modifier key, 1 week will be added or subtracted. The shortcuts for due dates behave similarly.

If you look at the position of those shortcuts on a US keyboard, you will see that we have chosen them to be in close proximity to one another:

If you have a non-US keyboard layout, then the [ and ] keys might be replaced by other keys, like umlauts for example in the case of a German keyboard:

The general idea is to keep the position of the keys the same no matter how those keys are labeled. This ensures that the keyboard shortcuts are easily accessible, regardless of the actual language/keyboard layout.

Spotlight

The first time you launch Things 1.2, it will prepare your existing database for Spotlight search. After this is completed, you will be able to find all your to-dos and projects via Spotlight. If you’re looking at the Spotlight search results in the Finder, you can even press the spacebar (which invokes QuickLook) and get a preview of the to-do. If you double-click the to-do, Things will become the active application and show the actual to-do.