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Last active December 24, 2015 17:19
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Preparing my laundry-list for @culturedcode re: Things.app
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gistfile1.md

Submitting-to: http://culturedcode.com/contact/

I'm a huge, huge fan of Things. Been a user for quite a while, was one of your early beta testers, and I evangelize it constantly. For whatever it's worth towards seeing some of these things fixed, or development time put to implementing them, I'd also like to point out that I've referred at least a dozen people to buying at least one of the Things suite of apps.

So. Here we go!

Bugs & issues

  • Mac: sometimes if I use a hot-key to add and then immediately remove-again a tag, the UI freezes. Everything is still interactable (if I click-and-drag in the main view area, my cursor picks-up an action ... it's just not the action I see); it's just visually frozen. (I'm on Mavericks.)

  • Not sure if it can be considered a bug, but you, in a completely undocumented fashion, convert a particular subset of possible tag-names to mildly-relevant emoji on iOS. I'd ask that you either open that functionality up to us, for use in our custom tag hierarchies; or, alternatively, that you leave our tag-names alone in all cases.

  • You can set dates longer than ‘15 days’ away on the Mac app, and they carry over to iOS ... but if you accidentally change them on iOS, then you can't surpass 15 days. Can be frustrating.

  • I use a set of very short, visually-distinguished tags that are intended to populate the ‘end’ of an action's bar, thus lining-up and aiding my ability to visually skim through my tasks quickly. Unfortunately, when I have a due-date on a task, it pushes those tags out of line, ruining this useful approach. I'd love to see due-dates colour the end of tasks' bars, but only show text when hovered ... or perhaps, display the text smaller, in the bottom-corner of the task, not affecting the tags' locations: http://ell.io/ijIuj

  • I couldn't find any obvious way to re-enable a de-activated area-of-responsibility. I had to right-click on the “Areas” header in the Mac app, and then find it in the list, there. That's totally non-obvious, and it could easily appear to a non-poweruser that the Area is gone forever.

  • There should be an option, when deleting an Area, to move all of its tasks out of the Area, but keep them. I don't see why all enclosed tasks need to be deleted with the Area, instead of just being made into Area-less tasks in your ‘Next’ list, or something.

  • There's an arbitrary height-limit to the Tags-list window on OS X. When working on a big screen, and with a lot of tags, it's inconvenient. I'd like to be able to use all of that vertical space! http://ell.io/iJHHr

  • When in ‘fullscreen mode’ on OS X Mountain Lion, I either have to have a second display, and move the tags-list panel to the second screen; or I have to cover some important part of the primary Things window with the tag-list itself. I'd love to see a way to turn the tags-list into a sub-panel of the main window, either by docking it or something similar; that way, in fullscreen (which I use often), I could use the tags-list without obscuring some part of the rest of the interface.

Small, but important, feature-requests: ‘Needs’

  • It'd be ideal if there were a configuration-option or something, to display all of a Project's tasks in the Today list, when the Project became due.

    For me, this:

    is less useful than this:

  • There is absolutely no API that I can tell. In fact, there's no way at all to get my data out of Things. This didn't bother me so much, until I recently tried to switch to OmniFocus, and realized all of my data was locked-in to your toolset. That's a scary realization.

    Although I'd (of course) prefer a full API, it'd be more than enough to simply give me an export or backup function: give me an official way to get a copy of the SQLite database, or even a straight-forward CSV dump, or something in XML. I don't really care. Anything'll do for me, at this point. I just want peace-of-mind.

    Please. Don't be assholes. Give me an exit-strategy for your service. (Don't get me wrong, I love you guys; it's a testament to how much I value your product, that I continue to use and evangelize it despite such a large failing ... but, nonetheless, it seriously needs to be remedied.)

  • With any complex-enough tag hierarchy, it's easy to forget what you made a little-used, but fairly important, tag for. Please allow us to attach notes to tags themselves.

  • It'd be nice to be able to set ‘default tags’ for a particular device; that is, by default filter all views to “Work”-tagged items on my work-computer, and to “Home” on my home-computer. Or automatically to “Errands” on my iPhone. You know, general stuff.

Big, but willing to wait, feature-requests: ‘Wants’

  • I switched to OmniFocus, very briefly, for location-aware Contexts. I'd been doing something similar to those contexts for ages, in Things (http://ell.io/i3zaJ), but I really miss the ability to link a geographically-oriented Context to my phone's geolocation. I'd love to have a push-notification inform me of my Chicago tasks when I land at ORD, or of my south-loop tasks when I cross the river, so to speak.

  • Repetition is great for individual tasks; but I find that the repetitive things in my life tend to fall under projects. It'd be ideal to be able to add a repetition to an entire project, and thus effectively have repeating monthly check-lists for various projects.

  • Sub-tasks / inline task groups. I know you guys talked about this early-on, and decided not to do it, but may I please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please allow me to appeal that decision. I don't want to create a whole ‘project’, to clutter up my interface and mind-space, for “sign up for Steam Machines beta”; but there's several serially-oriented tasks I need to complete before I can do that.

    A little elaboration, on this one. The entire point of Things (unless I missed something big-time), is to aid with the GTD-esque goal of ‘clearing your head’: get all those little goals floating around in there, out, so you can actually focus on what you're doing. However, if I have to maintain in my head the fact that task has to wait until tasks and , then that task hasn't really been gotten out of my head at all, and Things has failed at its' job for that particular part of my life.

    And, unfortunately, I find myself keeping task-relationships in my head like that more and more, the more I try and use Things to simplify my life.

    Please, find me a solution for this huge, huge problem. )=

I'm @ELLIOTTCABLE on Twitter, and I've chatted with your representative there, before; please, feel free to follow-up on any of these via e-mail or there. (=

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