So far only very few users actually did run into the Apple (Tiger-only) Core Data bug we mentioned in the previous post. It is also very easy to help. We encourage everyone who cannot open his or her Things library to contact us.

To make this easier, we added a dialog in version 0.8.4 (Release Notes) to assist users in the process. This dialog is displayed automatically should there be a problem with the library.

By now, we have sent out invites to more than 13,000 people. And everyone who purchased the recent MacUpdate bundle also got access to Things. With so many new users, it is no surprise that new bugs were discovered. This release fixes the most important ones and greatly increases stability. For more details, see the Release Notes.

User reports indicate some potential crashes related to Undo/Redo. We therefore temporarily disabled undo functionality until we had a chance to get a clear picture of what is going on.

We would like to thank Dan, Grant, and Alex for helping us to discover one of the most serious bugs we ever encountered in one of Apple's frameworks (Core Data XML Store). Under Tiger, notes that contained hashes (#) were garbled when Things was closed and subsequently reopened. This could even lead to archives becoming inaccessible. Apple already fixed this bug in Leopard and we have included a workaround in 0.8.3 so that Tiger users are now safe as well.

One of the pleasant surprises of the previous 0.8.1 release, from our point of view, was the extend to which the integrated feedback dialog was adopted. Already 4 days after the release, I cannot imagine how we ever managed without it.

We fixed most of the new bugs introduced in 0.8.1 and some older ones as well. In total, 9 bugs were fixed and 4 new features added.

The various lists like Inbox, Today, Next, ... are now accessible via the keyboard shortcuts ⌘0, ⌘1, ⌘2, .... The other new features are mostly targeted to users new to Things:

• For each list, we added brief explanations which are only displayed when the corresponding lists are empty. Of course, there is also a close button to hide them permanently. The close button is displayed when the mouse is over the boxes containing the explanations.
• We added a start-up screen that is displayed when Things is opened for the first time. Later it can be invoked from the Help menu, which now also contains an item which opens the Things wiki. The start-up screen contains a graphical introduction that will be most helpful for user that hadn't a chance to take a closer look at our web site.
• The current version has some limitations when it comes to drag and drop:
  
  1. Projects cannot be reordered in the sidebar (will be fixed soon).
  2. To-dos in active projects cannot be postponed or put on hold.
  
  Interestingly perhaps, we deliberately introduced the latter limitation to make Things easier to understand and use. However, we are much less sure about it now and are indeed working on improvements. That might take us a while, however, which is why Things now displays feedback when the user attempts such operations and explains that these limitations are acknowledged as such and will be fixed.

A complete list of improvements is in the Release Notes.

The new release contains 21 improvements and bug fixes. More detailed information about the new features can be found in the articles below:

• Providing Feedback from within Things
• Quick Entry Got Quicker - and Better!
• Dates, Dates, Dates
• Natural Language Input for Due Dates