The new release contains 12 bug fixes and improvements related to features we introduced in version 0.9.

A notable feature of Things 0.9, that didn’t get enough attention last time, is the new bug reporting dialog. Things 0.9 is very eager when it comes to reporting errors. In fact, a little too much so. Every little error message was promoted to a crash. This is great for developers because we get a lot of error reports and have the chance to improve the reliability of Things quickly. On the other hand, some users who never saw Things crash now did so for the first time.

We remedied the situation in the following way. Things will still offer to send an error report even when uncritical errors are encountered. But the error report dialog no longer forces the user to quit the application.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience and thank everyone who sent error reports.

The most substantial improvement in version 0.9 is, of course, recurring to-dos and projects. See below for an entire post describing this new feature.

Here is a list of some of the other improvements:

Choose Things Library

This is clearly an advanced feature that should be used with care. When holding down the option/alt key while opening Things, a dialog will be displayed that lets you either create a new Things library or choose an existing one. This feature is practically identical to a similar one in iTunes.

You can now store your library in a place that might be more convenient for your backup routine. Choosing a web-based location is not possible.

This feature is probably most interesting for people who would like to carry their Things library with them. Plug in a portable or USB flash drive and move your Things library from its default location Home/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/ to that drive. Move the entire Things folder and don't forget to quit Things first! The next time you open Things, it will ask you for the new location.

Better error handling

Things will now catch more unexpected errors and also offers a convenient way to send reports via email. Due to some limitations in Tiger this feature works best on Leopard.

Duplicate

There is a new Duplicate menu command in the Edit menu.

Scheduled

The Postponed list is now called “Scheduled”. There are a couple of improvements here. Since the Scheduled list will be the home of our recurring item templates, “Postponed” no longer seemed appropriate. But more about this in the post below. Scheduled now uses relative dates and groups items under headings like “Next week”, “April”, etc.

Move to Today

When an item is postponed, there is an option to automatically move it to the Today list on the specified date.

There are also many bug fixes, some of them quite substantial. More details can be found in the Release Notes.

Early on many users told us how important an implementation of recurring tasks would be for them. Having always (mis)used iCal events for recurring tasks myself, I hadn’t seen the need for a corresponding feature in Things. So much for what difference user requests can make :). And I finally noticed that hacking recurring tasks via iCal events isn’t that great after all. For some weeks now I have been looking forward to manage my recurring activities properly. And now I can.

When implementing recurring tasks one basically has the choice of either doing a primitive version like “every x days/weeks/months” or doing it in a really flexible and powerful way: enter Things 0.9.

Let’s look at an example: mortgage payments. Things allows rules like “Mortgage payment is due on the last day every month. Remind me 3 days in advance.” For the most part of the month you really don’t need to think about the payment. In that respect recurring tasks are no different than other postponed items except that they automatically repeat. It is thus natural to let the Postponed list handle recurrence. And since the term “Postponed” didn’t seem appropriate anymore we renamed it to “Scheduled”. This is how it works:

The Scheduled list

The Scheduled list does not contain the actual to-dos you are eventually going to check off, but it contains templates instead that are used to create those to-dos. This approach has a number of advantages:

• The Scheduled list gives you a great overview of all your recurring activities. They are nicely organized by interval and provided with descriptive labels. Together with single postponed items, the Scheduled list contains everything you needn’t be concerned with just now, but will be brought to your attention on the specified dates in the future.
• Since recurring items live in Scheduled, they don’t clutter up the lists you are working from. Instead, on the dates you specified, copies of the relevant templates are made and put into the Today list. Once completed those tasks will be logged getting out of your way until new copies are created.
• Since the actual to-dos are completely independent from their templates, you can edit them as you wish. For example, let’s assume you want to do monthly reports that always have a certain structure. You can put an outline of that structure into the template’s note section. Every month a copy of the template is made. Consequently, each copy will already contain your outline. Each month you can then fill in different details. All monthly reports will eventually go to the Logbook where they can be review as needed.

Creating new recurring tasks

You can create a new template in Scheduled by clicking the toolbar button “New Repeating”.

Or you can turn an existing task or project into a repeating one by editing it and using the action gear button at the bottom right of the item.

Recurrence patterns

There are many options for creating recurrence patterns. For example, use “After Completion” for tasks like “tidy up desk” that don't depend so much on the calendar, but on the last time you've completed them. And on Leopard you can even use iCal events as a pattern (think “Birthday calendars”). Projects can be made repeating too (check lists).

Implementing recurring tasks like we did was significantly more complex than we anticipated. But I believe it was worth the wait. If I am not overlooking something here, then we now have the most powerful recurring tasks implementation available. And I hope you like it.

We've gone to great length to ensure that most bugs are fixed already. But with a complex feature like this one, it is quite likely we didn't catch everything. Please keep a close eye on it and make sure it is working as you expect. And when it doesn't, choose Things > Provide Things Feedback... from Things' main menu and tell us what happened.

... it is about whether listening to users makes sense. Steve Jobs in a Fortune interview recently said: “So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.”’”

On the iPhone special event, however, Phil Schiller said something different. “... there are a lot of things, these and others, that enterprise customers have told us... So we have been hard at work listening to them, compiling lists, trying to understand, what do they really want...”

Of course both Jobs and Schiller know that there are times when you listen to users and times you better not. And the interesting thing is, even when developers don’t listen, they might do it for the best of their users. But how is that?

By all means developers need to follow their vision without asking anybody. They need to think out of the box and innovate. How else could they surprise and ultimately delight?

One of the main responsibilities of a developer is to keep guard over the gestalt of a program. It is all too easy to let your application burst into a universe of hardly connected little features. We have all seen it happen. But it is equally easy to ignore your customers’ needs and to embark on a journey where nobody is following you.

It is not about listening or not, it is about what to do with all the things you have learned from listening. And that is integration. The best feature is worth nothing when not integrated properly. When we read a feature request, we don’t think about doing it or not doing it. After all, if software development is not about satisfying users, then what is it? We are thinking about how we could nicely integrate it with the rest of the application without diluting its identity.

So let us worry about the identity and gestalt of Things. Let us surprise you every once in while, but for everything else we are all ears.

And why didn’t we write about the iPhone SDK? Because it is covered quite well elsewhere.