Hello, I’m Michael!

Allow me to express my gratitude to my new team for inviting me to come along for the ride. This is much more than a job to me – it’s an opportunity to be part of something special. And no, they didn't pay me to say any of this – I already got the job. ;)

Cultured Code invited me to head up marketing, business development, and communication. Things is an amazing product, and I am excited to be part of its future development.

What amazes me even more than Things itself is the community that has developed around it. In the past few days, I've been busy reading previous blog posts, tweets, and forum entries. With communication at the core of my responsibilities, I am very much looking forward to taking part in future discussions!

Over the next few months leading up to the release of Things 1.0 at Macworld Expo 2009, more details will be revealed on our blog and Twitter feed, so stay tuned.

When we started the public development of Things, we invited everyone on an “interesting journey”. And interesting it was, to say the least. It also was a much longer one than we ever expected.

We are very happy to announce today that Things 1.0 will be released at Macworld Expo 2009, on January 6th. Here is what will be constantly on our minds over the next few weeks, the Things release countdown timer:

When you embark on a journey, you know the direction‚ maybe the destination; but you cannot‚ and in fact you don't want to‚ control what happens on the way. After all, it's the unexpected things that make a journey interesting.

Some things are bound to happen, like users strongly advocating features we previously didn't deem that important. Needless to say we were happy to oblige: Things 0.9.2 Brings Support for Leopard's System-wide To-do Service, Recurring Tasks XXL. Some things you wish to happen, like the iPhone SDK and the amazing iTunes App Store. And some things you can only dream of, like being mentioned on Apple's iPhone page.

What was first, the hen or the egg? When relying on venture capital, it is clearly the company that is created first. Then the company creates its products. With an indie developer, things are not that clear cut. An indie developer jumps first and then learns how to fly. First and foremost is always the product; then the company is built to support and nurture the product as needed.

As paradoxical as it may sound, we found that the biggest enemy of an indie developer is success. The more successful we became, the less time we could spend on the actual development. This summer, when we were laying the groundwork for the future of Cultured Code, we even dropped the ball. We were no longer able to keep up with blog and forums. No doubt, people noticed. And how could they have known that it was actually us working overtime that caused the lapse?

We decided that this cannot ever happen again. But promises aren't enough. After all, we are product guys. What we clearly needed was a communication guy. Hiring the right people is crucial to the success of a company. If you don't get it right, you are doomed. That is why we are so happy that we have found the perfect fit for Cultured Code: Michael Simmons. He gets who we are. Michael will watch our backs and take care of any obstacles that may come up. In short, he will help us to stay what we are: product guys.

This morning, Apple gave the green light for Things touch 1.1. The most prominent new feature is the ability to sync with the desktop version of Things. It took us quite some time to find and fix most of the syncing related bugs, many of which were reported by our 100 brave beta testers. Thanks to all of you!

Other improvements are a faster dialog for entering new to-dos, an app icon badge, and a customization of the automatic logging behavior. We have also added localizations for French, Spanish, and Japanese.

Enabling Sync

Please make sure that you have both the latest desktop version (0.9.4) and the latest iPhone version (1.1) installed. Also, both your Mac and your iPhone/iPod touch have to be connected to the same wireless network. To turn on syncing, start Things on the desktop, go to Preferences > iPhone, and follow the on-screen instructions.

App Icon Badge and Automatic Logging

The app icon badge is disabled by default. To enable it, just launch the Settings application on your iPhone and go to the Things settings screen. The automatic logging behavior can be changed in this screen as well.

What's Next

The past few weeks have been quite a ride. We all worked very hard to get the syncing update out, so now is the time for us to relax a bit and refill our energy. We have also found a wonderful new office to move into which no doubt will boost our productivity even more :)

Once we are back to coding, there are quite a few to-do items on our list. First, the desktop app will see some long awaited improvements that will push it closer to 1.0. The iPhone version will also get updates that bring bug fixes (if you find any), and support for Tags and Areas. We will post more details on the roadmap as soon as we get to it. And as always, we will keep you updated on our progress via Twitter.

As you probably know, before allowing anything into the App Store, Apple reviews not only new applications but also each update of existing ones. This process took quite some time for 1.0.1, but we are happy that it is finally available. The update brings important bug fixes and a German localization.

Syncing will be part of the next update. Coding of the desktop/iPhone sync feature is almost complete! Jürgen has successfully synced the 800 items in his library (not including the logbook). During the next few days we will apply final tweaks, ensure that the whole process is forgiving of network failures. And of course, we will be doing extensive testing.

Users of many other applications have reported data loss problems after installing updates, and sadly, Things is no exception. This is not a fault on our side, but rather a strange bug in iTunes/iPhone OS. From a quick survey on Twitter we can tell, that for most users the update went without a hitch. But a few users reportedly lost their data. As far as we know, no one has yet been able to reliably reproduce this bug, so we don't know how long it will take Apple to fix it.

Once syncing between Things and Things touch is finished and available, the whole data loss issue will be much less of a threat. In the meantime, and for those of you who don't use Things on the desktop, there is a procedure you can follow to prevent data losses until Apple has resolved the issue. Note that this procedure works equally well for all iPhone applications, not just Things.

Updating safely

1. Back up your iPhone by syncing it with iTunes just before you install any update.
2. Disconnect your iPhone and install the update on the device.
3. If you didn't lose your data, all is fine. If you did lose your data, you can restore it from the backup. But you have to be very careful. When you connect your iPhone to your computer, iTunes automatically overwrites the existing backup with a new one. Since you just lost your data on the device, this will effectively delete your previous backup from iTunes! To prevent this, you need to do the following:
   1. Disable automatic syncing for your iPhone in iTunes' preferences before you connect the iPhone again (iTunes > Preferences > Syncing > Disable automatic syncing for all iPhones and iPods).
   2. Connect your iPhone and wait until it appears in iTunes' sidebar. Since syncing is disabled, iTunes won't back up your data automatically.
   3. Right-click (or control click) on the iPhone and select "Restore from backup".