Things has long been one of the premier task management apps for iOS and macOS. It has been a great example of high quality software. Things has always been quick to adopt the latest OS features introduced by Apple. Last year, Cultured Code dropped Things 3 – a major update to Things 2 – after 5 years of hard work. Things 3 is packed with a stunning new interface, delightful animations, and tons of powerful features new features.

Things 3, according to me, is the best task management app available on the App Store. Things 3, as mentioned earlier, released last year and folks at Cultured Code have already released six major updates to the app thus solidifying its position as the best task management app for me. It is one of the most pleasant and convincing piece of software I’ve ever used. Lets look at why i consider Things 3 as the best task management app on the App Store.

Design

Things 3 is the most beautiful app i’ve ever seen and used. It’s hard to find an app that looks and feels better than Things. When i installed the app for the first time, 3 months ago, i was stunned by seeing how good the design of the app is, and how delightful the animations are. Cultured code has done a superb job in creating a beautiful and aesthetically pleasing experience, that is consistent across all platforms. No wonder its an Apple Design Award winner.

Every gesture in Things 3 invokes subtle eye pleasing and soul-satisfying animations. Animations are buttery smooth and they add depth to the interface, helping us understand what is going on. Cultured Code has nailed these interactions with Things 3, they are subtle, beautiful, and useful. They are a delight to watch.

The new interface makes magnificent use of white space, it sports gorgeous icons, and uses bold fonts. It looks spectacular, yet simple. This simplicity fused with beautiful design creates a truly satisfying experience not offered by any other to-do app on the App Store. Screenshots can’t show how beautiful the experience is, you’ll have to use it to feel it. Application’s navigation is also great.

Task Structuring

With Things 3 your tasks are organized in various sections of the app. There are four views – Today, Upcoming, Anytime, and Someday.

Today is where you can see all of the tasks that are scheduled for the current day, and tasks that are overdue. Overdue tasks have a red flag. It also includes a ‘This Evening’ section where you can add tasks and it creates a separation between daytime and nighttime tasks.

Upcoming contains tasks scheduled for some specific dates in the future. Each of the next seven days are listed individually, which really helps in viewing how busy our next week is. After that, tasks are categorized in a week by week or month by month basis. You can also drag the plus button, and create tasks for some specific dates in the future.

Anytime is another list in Things 3. It is a section that contains tasks from today and tasks that have no start date. These are tasks that you want to address when you have a free time.

Someday is another section found in Things 3. It is where you can place tasks that you want to address some day, but don’t have a clear plan for yet. These are tasks that you want to deal with, when you have a better plans about them.

Logbook is where you can view all of your completed tasks. If you accidentally tick a task, you can go back and untick it in Logbook.

Tasks

Creating tasks is one of the most basic parts of the task manager. Just like other task managers, you’ll find a plus button in the bottom right side of the screen, that’ll allow you to add new tasks. This is called the Magic Plus Button.

True to its name, this button works like magic. It can be dynamically moved around the screen to do different things. It can be dragged and dropped from its usual position to other spaces to create To-dos, headings and more. Lift the button with your finger and drag it to insert a to-do at the desired place in your Today list, or under the right heading in the project, or under the right day in upcoming. Drag and drop button into your list of projects to create a new project. When you’re inside a project, just drag the button to the left margin to create headings. Drop it into the Inbox icon that appears in the lower left corner to add a task to your inbox.

Once you’ve created a task, or a project, you can assign a name to it. Task can be saved quickly after creating it, or more data can be assigned to the task, with Things you can these types of data:

Notes

Start dates

Time-based reminders

Tags

Checklists

Deadlines

When you tap on a task, it will expand into a card-like form with rest of the list fading a little in the background. Data you add to the task exists within the card interface. Notes you add can be made visible by tapping and opening the task. One thing I really like in Things 3 is that I can easily create checklists by tapping the checklists icon on the card interface, checklists can be made visible tapping and opening the task.

Things allows you to create time-based reminders and great thing about they can be created using natural language input, and it will send you a notification depending on the time you add. You can also assign a deadline to the task, date within a task should be completed. Things 3 also supports repeated tasks, you can create repeated task by tapping three dots on the menu that appears at the bottom and then selecting “repeat”. You can choose from variety of options like “repeat weekly”, “repeat monthly”, or you can choose from some complex options like “repeat every month on last sunday”. You can also apply tags and deadlines to multiple tasks at once, which can be done by tapping the ••• button after selecting multiple tasks.

You can create tasks in Things from other apps as well, using action extension. For example, if you find an interesting article while browsing in Safari, and you want to add it to Things. Just tap the share button and select ‘add to things’ from the action extension and a task will be added to Things with article’s heading being its Title and link of the article will be added to its notes.

Things also has clipboard integration, allowing you to easily add tasks from clipboard. It is really helpful when you receive a list of to-dos from someone and don’t want to add them one-by-one in the app. With Things you can simply copy that text and add it to Things easily. Just tap the down-facing arrow in the upper right corner, and then select paste.

In Things 3, tasks that are placed in the Today simply move to the next day when unfinished. There is no need for you to rearrange the dates. The Today list simply moves forward.

Creating tasks in Things 3 is quite simple. Magic plus button is a unique part of Things 3, it is a delight to use. You can do so much with such a small UI element. It works like magic.

Long-press a task and it will pop out of the list and gather under your finger, allowing you to drag and rearrange or reorder your tasks to reschedule them to some other date. You can also swipe right on a task to add to-dos to today, or evening, or you can set time-based reminder. Swipe left on a task to select it. Once you’re in selection mode, multiple tasks can be selected by just swiping your finger up or down the circles on the right. Once a batch of tasks are selected, you can perform actions on them like, you can move them to a different list, mark all of them as complete, reschedule them, delete them, and much more.

All of these attributes make tasks more than just a text, in Things. You can assign so much information to the tasks, it beautifully done by Cultured Code. Interacting with a group of tasks also feels great and useful. You can easily move stuff around.

Projects and Areas

The most important attribute of Things 3 is how projects are treated. It allows me to easily manage tasks and information associated it. A project can have different types of data. You can add notes to the projects. You can add tasks, checklists, and create headings in a project or area. Headings allows you to better organize tasks in Projects. Additionally, each task can include notes as mentioned earlier and tasks can also include a checklist. You can add so much data to each task, as mentioned earlier. You can easily move tasks around by dragging and dropping it. Each project has its own progress bar, which fills up as you complete the tasks inside It. All of this may sound messy, but Things makes it look beautiful and simple.

Things also contains Areas. An ‘area’, is larger than a project, and is for grouping all of your projects and to-dos that support an ongoing objective. Areas can contain their own lists of projects and to-dos based on different purposes. In the main menu, areas are represented by bold text, while projects, in their accompanying areas, are represented in a lighter font. Areas here are collapsable meaning that, if your project list is very long and you don’t want to see your projects while on vacation, you can simply collapse your areas and hide them.

There is an area for everything. Keep track of your ongoing college projects by creating a College Project area. Keep an eye on your savings for the future with Money area. Areas are a great place to shrink down your focus. I really like the simplicity of this, and it doesn’t feel like a mess.

You can organize any specific project you create, with headings. It helps in better organizing our tasks within a project. You can add a number of headings to group a number of related tasks. When you’re inside a project, just drag the magic plus button to the left margin to create a heading, or you can add a heading by tapping the down-facing arrow in the upper right corner of the screen and selecting ‘New heading’. You can use headings in so many ways, suppose, you have a project in Things related to your college project, you can create a heading named ‘testing’, which will contain a group of tasks that you have to complete while testing your project. Its so useful, and beautiful, yet simple.

Tags

Today, most of the task managers offer tags. Tags are a great way of filtering our tasks. You can add tags to a task or a project, it is quite easy. You can add tags to specific tasks from its card view, by tapping the tag icon and selecting the required tag. In projects, simply tap the three dots placed along with project title and then tap ‘add tags’. You can also sort tasks by tags in Today, projects, or area. It is really useful when you have a long list of tasks and you only want to view some specific tasks, really helps in filtering our tasks.

You can search for tags using quick find, and then tap your desired tag, which will bring up a screen with all the tasks associated with the tags. You can also search for tags from the tagging screen in Things, simply pull down and reveal the search field, and search for tags. You can create new tags as well.

Mail to Things

Mail to Things is a way to create to-dos from other apps, services, and platforms. It consists of an email address where you have to forward messages, which then, will become tasks in Things’ inbox. You’ll have to enable Mail to Things in settings. Just Open Things Cloud’s settings and Enable Mail to Things, which will generate a unique email address that you can save to your contacts and send messages to. So, if you receive an email that you want to turn into a task in Things, just send that as an email to your new @things.email address and a task will be added to Things’ inbox, with title of the task being the subject of the email and note being the message body. Only text is added to task notes as attachments are not supported by Things. It works quite fast, and is reliable.

Mail to Things also includes ‘Fwd:’ from the forwarded message’s subject line and includes the whole body of the message as task notes. There is a :// URL at the bottom of the note to open the message in Apple Mail. It allows you to go to the email easily, not having to search for the message in the mail app.

Mail to Things is made more powerful thanks to the integration with automation services and apps – such as Workflow, IFTTT, and Zapier – you can use Mail to Things to build workflows that create to-dos for you automatically. There are tons of possibilities with what you can do with these workflows.

Mail to Things is a powerful way to create to-dos from other platforms, as most of the task creation methods are only available within the Apple ecosystem. Mail to Things opens up a new way to create to-dos in Things, really helpful when we are using some other platform or services and want to add a task to Things.

URL Scheme and Automation

Things 3 offers one of the most powerful and flexible URL scheme for a task a management app. The URL scheme lets users and developers of other apps send commands to Things. The first time you execute a command via the URL scheme, Things will ask you if you want to enable this feature. Simply answer with Enable. If you want to turn it off, go to the settings then go to General → Advanced → URL Scheme and disable it. URL scheme enables so many automation possibilities, you can create workflows, launcher shortcuts, and so much more. You can read the documentation published by Cultured Code here.

With Things URL scheme you can create tasks, projects, search the app, view specific sections of the app, update projects, and so much more. It offers so many customizations and there is so much you can do with these URL schemes. Not many apps offer URL scheme as powerful, and flexible as these are. Cultured Code has done a great job here.

Things 3 also supports JSON-based commands to make it easy for third-party developers to add items to Things from their apps. Team at Cultured Code has created an open source Swift library, to make it easy for developers add support for exporting data to Things, you can look at the documentation here. JSON support opens Things to automation from third-party developers like MindNode, in my review of MindNode 5, i showed an example of how a MindMap is converted into a project in Things. You can read my review of MindNode here

Developers of Things have provided practical examples of how their URL schemes work, in their documentation here, to get you started. Cultured Code has also provided a Link Builder in which you can type information in fields of different commands and see what the resulting URL scheme would look like. It helps you understand how URL scheme works in Things. Its a great place to get you going.

There is an extension, called Copy Link, it allows you to copy the URL of Projects, Areas, individual Tasks, and more. It is available from the Share menu, to bring it up for Project, Area, or Inbox simply tap the downward-facing arrow in the top right and press share. For individual tasks, select a task, then tap the three-dot ‘More’ button, then Share. The URL generated by this extension looks like this:

things:///show?id=7E5CBF56-3935-41E4-8B70-4D70287D6CCF

The string that follows the id part is a unique identifier of an item in Things. It is very useful for creating Launcher shortcuts, Workflows, etc.

Things has six primary commands: add, add-project, show, update, update-project, and search.

You can create launcher shortcuts with these URLs. It is really useful, as with one touch you’ll be taken to your desired view or task. If you want to open Today list in Things with launcher shortcut, it is really simple. URL scheme for viewing Today list is: things:///show?id=today.

If you want to view your inbox, you just need to add this URL: things:///show?id=inbox.

URL for viewing your upcoming list is: things:///show?id=upcoming.

If you want to navigate to a specific view, like an area, or a project, using a launcher shortcut, just copy the link of that specific list and use that as an action in the launcher. URL that i use to navigate to my Apphunt project is: things:///show?id=7E5CBF56-3935-41E4-8B70-4D70287D6CCF.

This navigates to a project with id: 7E5CBF56-3935-41E4-8B70-4D70287D6CCF

You can do much more with the help of these URL schemes. If you want to go to a view and filter it by a specific tag. You can do this easily with Things URL. Here is an example: This URL: things:///show?query=Today%20&filter=College will navigate to Today view and filter it with ‘college’ tag. I am a student so i keep my college tasks with ‘college’ tag in Things.

I use these shortcuts to easily navigate to the projects and areas. URL schemes require Things 3.4.

MindNode 5

MindMap has Things integration and If your mind map contains tasks, you can share your map to Things. This will create a project with all the tasks in the mind map. An example is shown, in which a mind map containing tasks is converted to project in things.

Things 3 offers one of the most powerful, and customizable URL scheme available. You can easily create launcher shortcuts, create workflows, and do so much more with it. URL scheme and automation is a huge topic, i will make another post explaining, in detail, about this.

Drag and Drop

Things 3 supports drag and drop on iPad which supports SlideOver and has iOS 11 or higher. Users can drop content into Things from other apps as new to-dos or in the notes section of existing to-dos. You can see it in action here:

If you have Things open beside Mail app on your iPad, you can drag an email and drop it into Things. Things will create a new to-do and insert a link back to the email for you so you can find it again later. You can also drop the email into the notes of an existing to do. You can quickly add multiple links and text to a to-do while using Safari, simply by dragging and dropping. You can drag and drop text or link from any app into Things.

Siri Integration

Things 3 also has siri integration and it requires iOS 11. You can enter to-dos in Things without even typing. Just invoke Siri and speak what you want to add to Things. To enable Siri in Things, just go to the settings and then to ‘Siri’ and then enable Siri for Things.

Once you’ve got this feature enabled, you can try it out on your iPhone or iPad. Here, you need to mention Things specifically, otherwise Siri will save your task to Apple’s Reminders app. You can create To-dos in Things with Siri. You can create To-dos in Things, here are some examples: You can say “In Things, remind me to buy milk.” This will add a to-do to your inbox. In order to add this to-do to your Today list, just say “In Things, remind me to buy Chocolate today.” and if you want to add it to your upcoming list, just say “In Things, remind me to buy chocolate tomorrow.”

You can add a task to a specific list and add a reminder as well, just say this to Siri. “In Things, remind me to buy Coffee beans today at 2pm.”

This will add a to-do in Today list and Things will notify you at 1pm. You can also add a task to specific project as well.

You can use Siri to create a project and add multiple to-dos to it as well. Just say: “In Things, add a new list.” You can specify a name to it, lets call it Apphunt. To add to-dos to your project, just say “Add to Apphunt list in Things” and then siri will ask you about the to-dos and then specify the to-dos.

You can use Siri to show you list as well, just say: “In Things, show my Inbox list.”, it will show your inbox list. You can also view your Today list by just saying “In Things, show my Today list.”

You can do so much more with Siri integration in Things, you can read more about it here. I am waiting for Siri shortcuts integration that is coming this fall.

External Keyboard Support

With Things 3.6, Cultured Code introduced desktop-class external Keyboard support for iPad. Things 3 offers one of the most powerful keyboard shortcuts in any task management app. Things on the iPad can be navigated entirely with the keyboard, making it easier to create tasks, manage projects, and do so much more. Things offers the best implementation of external keyboard support.

Keyboard Selection and Powerful commands

Selecting and moving items around with Drag and Drop on the iPad is really easy, useful, and feels intuitive. But you don’t get this sort of experience when using your iPad with external keyboard. Most iPad apps don’t support creating new selection with the keyboard, due to the limitations of iOS, it requires you to touch an item to select it. You have to lift your hand to select the object and then perform the desired command with Keyboard. Lifting your hand, making selection on the screen and then coming back to the keyboard can become tiresome when you are managing a big project. Things, on iPad, provides a true desktop-class experience. You can see it in action here:

With Things 3 you don’t need to touch the screen to select, you can select an individual task with the keyboard’s down arrow and then control everything with the keyboard. You can do so much with Keyboard Shortcuts, here are some things you can do:

Insert a to-do below your selection : ⌘ Cmd+N

: ⌘ Cmd+N Open a to-do with Return and Tab around inside of it.

Close the to-do again : ⌘ Cmd+Return

: ⌘ Cmd+Return Move items up or down the list : ⌘ Cmd+↑/↓

: ⌘ Cmd+↑/↓ Duplicate, copy, or paste items : ⌘ Cmd+D/C/V

: ⌘ Cmd+D/C/V Set a date: ⌘ Cmd+S

⌘ Cmd+S Mark it complete: ⌘ Cmd+K

You can find full list of Keyboard Shortcut here.

Quick Popovers

In Things users can select and control every popover with keyboard. Task popover has all the options for applying actions on a task. Open a popover, such as ⌘ Cmd+ S, then use the arrow keys to move your selection around or just start typing in any of them to filter down the result.

On mac, users can close the popover window with an escape key, but iPad Smart Keyboard lacks an escape key. So, how do you exit a popover on iPad? Cultured Code has got you covered, they’ve added a shortcut to exit a popover window: Cmd + .. This has been added to Things for Mac has well, for a consistent experience across all platforms.

Type Travel

Type Travel is a feature that was exclusive to Mac before Things 3.6. With Type Travel you can start typing from wherever you are in Things and results will appear in the middle of the screen, based on your query and then you can move through results with the arrow keys, and jump to a specific item by selecting it and pressing Return.

Things 3 offers a large number keyboard shortcuts, and a great keyboard control, you can work on your iPad without taking your hands off the keyboard. It provides a true desktop-class experience, not offered by any other app on the App Store.

Additional Features

Calendar Integration: You can allow Things to access your calendars so that your calendar events are listed inside Things. Each calendar you add will display its events in that calendar’s assigned color. This is really helpful, as you don’t have to manually add tasks from your calendar to Things.

Apple Watch: Things also has an Apple Watch app. It is very simple to use. It shows all tasks from your Today list. You can add a note to a task and add deadline to it, using the Apple Watch app. If a task contains checklist, you can mark it off as well. There is so much more you can do with its Apple Watch app. Things’ Apple watch app has a great icon too.

Search: Search and navigation in Things is very fast. It is called Quick Find. Just pull down from anywhere in the app and a search box will appear, allowing you to quickly find a specific task or tags or navigate to a specific list. Type Travel has made its way to Things for iPad thus providing a great search experience.

Haptic Feedback: If you have an iPhone that has Taptic Engine, then Things takes advantage of this as well. It responds with haptic feedback when interacting with the Magic Plus Button, dragging and dropping a task elsewhere, pulling down for search, and more.

Slim Mode : On iPad, you can Collapse your sidebar with a two-finger swipe, thus letting you focus on the task or list you are working on. This is really great when you need more space, or you are working in Split-View mode.

Things 3 is the best task management app for me. It offers a stunning interface, and delightful animations. Things has a great feel to it, its a pro app. Things 3 offers a number of way to create tasks, like, using Magic Plus Button, using action extension, using Siri, using 3D touch, and Mail to Things. I really like how projects are treated in Things, you can add so much data to it, but it still feels simple. Things offers one of the most powerful URL schemes available, you can customize each and every parameter in it. It offers the best implementation of external keyboard support, a true desktop-class experience. There is an Apple Watch app, siri integration, Haptic feedback, calendar integration, and so much more. It is worth the money.

Things 3 is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. iPhone app costs $9.99, the iPad version is $19.99, and the Mac version is $49.99.