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. :)

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!