In Person: Things 2.0
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Things 2.0 was released yesterday. It's the first major update to the app(s) in a long, long time. Huge update? No. But it did bring quite a bunch of nice new features.
What's New: There's a new Daily Review that show you all your To-Do items that have been scheduled for "today" and allows you to decide which items you would like to start that day and which you would like to postpone for another. (That particular feature was in the beta version for quite some time, but the rest of the additions are, for the most part, never before see.) You can now also a set Things to log items immediately, as opposed to only daily or when you tell it to. The iOS version (both iPhone and iPad) get both of those additions as well as a spiffy new date picker that allows you to quickly schedule an item by flicking through a never-ending calendar as opposed to the built-in iOS date picker. It's really quite great.
The entire suite of apps have also visually been updated and now look positively gorgeous. Every corner of the app has been beautified and it really shows.
The Mac version of the app was also given an interesting new feature (that will, presumably, sync to its iOS counterparts): Reminders integration. It works both ways, too. You can have Things automatically add its To-Do to Apple's Reminders app, or you can have anything added to Reminders show up in Things. The latter is far more useful and very clever, especially if you use shared lists in Reminders with family members.
The biggest talk of the 2.0 update though, is the sync engine. Again, it's been available in beta for quite some time now but it's now available for everyone to use. And it is wicked fast. Like, impossibly fast. Faster than any sync engine for anything you've probably ever seen.
What's still missing: For some reason, the Inbox view on iOS still does not have the "star button" to quickly mark items to do "today". Instead you have to tap a "move" button and then select "Today" for each To-Do item individually. Far too tedious.
The Bottom Line: Look, for those still perfectly happy with Things (my hand is raised high) this is a great update. A bunch of nice features that we'd like to have without making Things any less simple or easy to use. It's pretty, clean, and super functional. It does just what we need and nothing more. It is very truly the perfect tool for the job. Now if only, with the whole Cloud Sync thing out of the way, Cultured Code (the developers of Things) could get on a faster release cycle, everybody would be even happier.
