When we launched our forums, we spent a significant amount of time and energy trying to get it right. To make a long story short, we failed.

Today, we are re-launching our forums in an attempt to do better this time. Let’s take a look back at what we did (and didn't do) and why it didn’t work out the way we and our users expected.

Even though our blog and forums run on different software (Wordpress and Phorum), Chris was able to create a beautiful design that unified the way the comment section in our blog and discussion threads in our forum look like. We cut everything down to the essentials in order to create one of the most uncluttered forum interfaces possible.

When we finally launched the forums, we were very excited. Even though we never considered our forums to be anything else but user forums, we contributed quite a lot to the discussions that quickly emerged. We were happy to see that the forums attracted a number of nice people sharing their experience with using Things.

Anyone who has visited our forums lately will have most likely noticed that the times have changed. Trying to analyze the situation, I believe we made three mistakes:

1. We never clearly stated that, above anything else, we consider the forums to be user forums. That is forums for and from users of Things. We never intended to make any official statements there. In particular, we didn’t want to discuss future features in the forums. There are notable exceptions though, which, of course, only added to the confusion.
2. Our presence in the forums was sporadic and inconsistent. As I mentioned above, we contributed a lot in the beginning. Satisfied that everything worked beautifully, we moved our focus away. Every now and then, when an issue seemed particularly pressing, there was a sudden burst of activity from our side that quickly faded again. In hindsight, it is no surprise that users didn’t know what to expect.
3. We never really posted forum rules. Nor did we make a strong enough effort to consistently enforce the few we hinted at. Our reluctance to burden anyone with rules surely came from the best intentions, but it was unnecessary nevertheless. Every social context has them. Not only are we used to it anyway, it is actually good to know that everyone is playing the same game.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Simplified structure

From now on, there will only be three forums: “Using Things for the Mac”, “Using Things for iPhone and iPod touch”, and “Everything else”.

The two “Using Things...” forums are exclusively devoted to solving problems and improving productivity by sharing helpful information and concrete tips related to released versions of Things. Everything else goes to, well, I guess you know where :). If necessary, we will be moving off-topic threads from the “Using Things...” forums to “Everything else”.

More consistent presence from Cultured Code

We will be encouraging every member of Cultured Code to spend time in the forums. We will be making an effort to arrange our presence such that ideally every day one of us should be around for a while.

I want to emphasize that our presence doesn’t change the fact that we consider the forums to be user forums. We will no longer discuss details of future updates or their possible release dates in the forums.

Posting rules.

Everyone should communicate in a respectful and constructive way. Our posting rules are little more than an attempt to spell this out in a more detailed way. Nonconforming posts will be deleted without further notice. We also have some more guidelines, but neglecting those will not entail as harsh a consequence. Please read the full text here: Posting Rules and Guidelines.

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More than a week ago, we took the old forums offline. The reason being that we wanted to bring as many topics over to the new forums as possible. Since then, we have been busy sorting existing topics into the new forums. We didn’t bother to copy obsolete discussions, and of course we also didn’t move posts that do not conform to the new rules. This process will likely continue for some time.

We hope that our Forums 2.0 will be more useful and fun than version 1.0 has ever been! Come and join the discussion...

We are often asked about our plans for the future, and we would indeed love to discuss our plans in great detail. But there are so many reasons why it is in fact not such a good idea to publish detailed roadmaps. Today, I still would like to share a bit about what we are working on, while leaving a few secrets in the dark. After all, everybody enjoys a little surprise every now and then, right? ;)

Things for Mac

Our next release, Things 1.2, is due in about one or two weeks. Version 1.2 will be almost entirely about improving various aspects of keyboard support. Without going into the details here, let me just mention that 1.2 not only involves introducing many more keyboard shortcuts, but it also improves tabbing behavior when creating new to-dos, adds improvements for the quick entry window, provides support for Spotlight, and includes plug-ins for other apps. You might ask: "Why did those Cultured guys all of a sudden deem keyboard support that important?" Well, you'll see when we release 1.2 - this is one of the surprises mentioned above ;).

After version 1.2, it gets more interesting. The reason being that we will have more developer resources available to us! This means that we will be no longer doing one feature at a time. Instead, different development threads (or goals) will be followed simultaneously. Forthcoming articles will have more background on the extraordinary talent we were able to attract.

Here are our priorities for the next releases: Over-the-air sync, performance, bug fixes, easier collaboration, mixed projects, and better communication of how dates work. Let's flesh this out in a little more detail...

Believe it or not, we have been working on over-the-air sync since the beginning of this year. In the meantime, our goal changed from "something that works" (check out our competition if you want to know what we mean by that) to "a really sweet solution". The tough challenge here is to develop a highly performance-oriented solution that works for everybody. In particular, we wanted it to work for Mac and iPhone users alike, without requiring a MobileMe account (or any WebDAV disk for that matter).

The whole issue is indeed complex and interesting enough to warrant its own blog post, but suffice it here to say that we are well under way to providing the above-mentioned "really sweet solution" :).

Performance should be pretty self-explanatory. Users with large libraries are beginning to see sluggish behavior. This is unacceptable for an application whose foremost goal is to make you more productive. While Things 1.2 will already deliver some performance improvements, major attacks on all other performance related issues will be started immediately after finishing 1.2.

Collaboration is a very interesting problem space, and I think the importance of better support for teamwork in Things is pretty obvious. We will soon make a little step forward in this area to ease the workflow when working together. We are committed to constantly improve what we are doing here in the next few months and most likely well beyond.

For some users, mixed projects are a big deal. What we mean by this is the ability for active projects to also contain inactive and scheduled items. What seems to be an innocent change is in fact also a big deal for us as developers. When conceiving Things, we very deliberately did not want to have mixed projects. We so much didn't want it, that we even made the decision on the level of our data model design for both the Mac and iPhone version. This is the reason why we kept postponing the implementation of these improvements.

Things for iPhone and iPod touch

Let me close this non-roadmap with, uhh… a roadmap for Things touch:

• 1.4: Repeating tasks, global search, landscape mode
• 1.5: Push notifications, polish
• 1.6: People support

Tuesday, June 9th 2009 was a special day for Cultured Code. You might have already heard about it if you are following us on Twitter. During the week of June 8th, Apple held its annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.

This year, an unbelievably large crowd of more than 5000 developers went to the Moscone West conference center to get the latest scoop on Snow Leopard and iPhone OS 3.0, along with meeting Apple engineers and bombarding them with questions.

The evening of the second day of WWDC is traditionally reserved for celebrating the winners of the Apple Design Award (ADA). The trophy is a very elegant cube with a transparent Apple logo that lights up when you touch the cube:

Receiving an ADA is the dream of every Mac and iPhone developer. While not as glamorous as the Oscars - we are developers after all! - the significance of the ADA for the Mac community is not unlike that of an Oscar for the film industry.

Before we flew to San Francisco, we tried to convince ourselves that we had an actual chance of winning, but our hopes dwindled when we sat among thousands of other developers that Tuesday evening. With so many other contestants, receiving an ADA felt virtually impossible. But it happened! When Things was announced as a winner, we all shared a frozen moment in time - it was a dream come true.

Image courtesy of Hussein Morsy

Being awarded a prize for design excellence from a company like Apple means an awful lot to us. We are happy and proud; but most of all, it is an encouragement to continue to do the best job we possibly can.

Now that Things 1.3.5 for iPhone and iPod touch has been approved by Apple and is now available on the App Store, we are announcing the release of Things 1.1.2 for the Mac.

Besides a host of bug fixes and smaller changes, there are three major areas of improvement which are important enough to deserve their own blog posts:

• Things 1.1 Brings Extensive AppleScript Support
• Things 1.1 Brings a New Model for Working with Delegated Tasks
• Syncing Areas of Responsibility and More...

There are also many smaller (but not less important) improvements we couldn’t fit into one of the articles linked to above. Some of them fix issues that were driving some of our users crazy, such as keyboard shortcuts. ⌘S is no longer used to move a to-do to the Someday list. While the letter “S” is certainly not completely unrelated to the word “Someday” ;), pressing ⌘S is too deeply associated with saving a document in many user’s muscle memory. Therefore, the keyboard shortcut ⌘Y now toggles the active/inactive state of an item, moving next-action steps and active projects to Someday, or - vice versa - items from Someday back to the Next or Active Projects list.

Another keyboard shortcut that has changed is ⌘→ to bring up the dialog for moving items. The new shortcut is ⇧⌘F. The letter “F” refers to the corresponding menu command “File…”.

Due dates! There are so many different ways for using, or even not using, due dates to get organized. Some users found themselves having many overdue items, but ended up being reluctant to move the dates farther into the future. After all, changing a due date is probably not going to help you reach your goals earlier next time. Previously, when you you set an overdue item to “Not Today”, it was still moved back to the Today list when you re-opened Things or when you synced with your iPhone or iPod touch. The new versions of Things for the Mac and Things for iPhone and iPod touch will instead keep the items in the Next list until the next day.

If you are syncing with your mobile device, please be sure to update both Things for the Mac and Things for iPhone and iPod touch to get a consistent behavior across sync sessions.

Other improvements include:

• A faster and more reliable software update mechanism
• A unified way to send support inquires
• An updated iPhone preference pane that provides even more help and feedback to new users
• A more robust mechanism for discovering and pairing the desktop version of Things with its mobile sibling, in particular with busy networks

Don’t miss our more detailed articles below, and please don’t forget to download the new version of Things for iPhone and iPod touch. On both your mobile device and iTunes you might have to manually check for updates before Things touch 1.3.5 shows up. Enjoy!