Also, if the contact is online on iChat a small green dot will tell you so directly from Things. Clicking on teammate icon displays the tasks and projects he has. You can assign someone to a task or a project, but not to an area. Last sidebar dropdown is People: pretty self explanatory, you can choose a contact from your Address Book and make him a new “teammate”. Hell, I was in the Areas menu - why should I go back to Projects? Couldn’t it just expand there? God knows, hopefully CultureCode will fix this. But, when you click on the “3 items” link, the project expands revealing the items inside and “jumps” back to the Project menu. By default, once you’ve selected an area the project is collapsed and doesn’t display the whole list of items inside it: it displays something like “3 items” instead. Say you have a project with 3 tasks inside and the project is assigned to an area. One thing I really can’t stand about this, is how Things displays projects inside areas. Sure, you can assign a single task to an area, but I’ve never used that feature. Once you’ve created a bunch of projects, Things also enables you to group projects into Areas. Overall, a great feature if you consider that you can also reschedule and pause tasks. For some strange reason the recurring tasks expand in a different way than “normal” tasks when double clicked. The setting up process is fast and easy and really requires two clicks to be running. One of the best features of Things is that of setting up recurring tasks: imagine the usefulness of this for people like me who need to write an article at the end of each week (Favorite Tweets, Sharethe1st). Today’s panel shows tasks that should be completed the same day, for example. Obviously, these options don’t work as simple “containers” for new tasks, but they also display events that meet the section’s criteria. I use all of these options everyday, and I couldn’t be any happier with them: if I think of something I’d like to complete the same day, I quickly create a new todo inside it if I think about an idea I’d like to develop someday in the future, I put it into Someday. You can choose between Today, Next, Scheduled, Someday and Projects. Indeed, there’s a zone in the sidebar called “Focus” which enables you to divide and sort your tasks. I said Things it’s about giving context to your activities: by context I mean that the application gives you the right tools to organizing tasks in bigger or more focused “spaces”. Things.app has a pyramid-like structure: there are 4 main sections that compose this pyramid, in a very precise order: Things isn’t just about completing task: it’s about giving structure and context to them, then complete and archive them. Since CulturedCode won an Apple Design Award for Things last year, it seems like everyone has jumped into the “Getting Things Done with Style” trend, missing in many ways all the features that Things offers and the main idea behind it. I’ll go into Things Touch at the end of the post anyway. First, let me state that I own both the Mac and iPhone versions, but I use the Mac version more. That won’t change the fact that I want to share my experience with you, and maybe teach you some tricks while we’re on it. Things is a very popular application, and it’s very likely that you’ve already read many articles and reviews about it. I’ll explain how I’ve set it up in order to manage MacStories’ activities and scheduled tasks and how I made it work as a team project management app as well. ![]() ![]() Today I’d like to talk about what’s in my opinion the best to-do management and task organizer app currently available for Mac and iPhone: Things. Now, the situation isn’t that tragic fortunately: it’s also true that there are many excellent apps, both for Mac and yes, the iPhone. And trust me: it’s full of apps like these out there. What a nice situation: getting things done with an application that requires 2 minutes just to set up a new task. There’s an interesting paradox floating around the Mac OS X scene: there are a lot of interesting apps to manage tasks and make your to-do workflow easier, but most of these apps are difficult to manage.
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