I’m a huge fan of Cultured Code’s Things (both on the desktop and iPhone). A few weeks ago, I sent them what I thought to be a simple question: “Can I sync Things on the iPhone with two different desktops?” I’m giving some thought to getting a netbook and hackintoshing it and was curious if I could sync Things with it and my MacBook. I got back a response along these lines: “Not yet, but we’re working on it.”

In a recent blog post titled “This is not a roadmap,” Cultured Code, um, laid out a roadmap — kinda, sorta, maybe. Its “a roadmap by any other name” hints at the following upcoming features:

• Things 1.2 for the desktop (due out in about two weeks) will improve keyboard support, especially shortcuts and tabbing behavior. Why the focus on keyboard shortcuts, you might ask? “Well, you’ll see when we release 1.2,” they said.
• After 1.2, they will have more gerbils to feed the wheel, err, developers to code Things, and the feature set for the following release hints at fun things: Over-the-air sync, performance, bug fixes, easier collaboration,mixed projects, and better communication of how dates work.

They claim they’ve been working on over-the-air syncing for a while, especially a method not requiring MobileMe (or any WebDAV). One of the issues I have with how Things on the iPhone currently works is there’s no push notification of tasks due today; while there is a badge count, I must open the app to have it refresh. In the blog post, Cultured Code promises version 1.5 of Things for the iPhone and Touch will have push notifications — they are currently at version 1.3, so this could take some time. An over-the-air sync that will allow me to keep my iPhone and multiple Macs up to date would thrill me.

Collaboration I’m less interested in. While I do use Things to manage projects at work, I’m the only user of Things, so this is of limited value to me. Mixed projects it claims are “the ability for active projects to also contain inactive and scheduled items.” I’m not 100 percent sure what it means by that, but if it helps me remember the status report I keep forgetting to do every week, I won’t complain.

You can read more about the changes in this blog post. According to a follow-up comment by the developers, all 1.x updates will be free updates. As a gigantic Things user, I’m looking forward to upcoming releases.

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Apple announced the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards last night at a special ceremony hosted by John Geleynse, director of Software Technology Evangelism, and Shann Pruden, senior director for Developer Relations. These awards are an annual affair to recognize “technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in iPhone and Mac software development.”

The depth and breadth of submissions has been accelerating, as interest in the Mac and iPhone has picked up over the last few years. As a point of comparison, the iPhone awards last year were handed out to early pre-release apps because the App Store had not even launched yet. There were about 1,700 web apps in Apple’s online directory, and this year there are over 4,000 web apps and more than 50,000 native apps available in the iTunes App Store.

Rather than being split out into categories for best game, best user experience, best application, and so on as has been the practice in past years, this year’s awards were simply organized into Mac and iPhone showcases. Here are the 2009 winners.

iPhone Developer Showcase

MLB.com At Bat 2009 from MLB.com

Postage from Rogue Sheep

Topple 2 from ngmoco:)

Tweetie from atebits

Mac OS X Leopard Developer Showcase

Billings from Marketcircle Inc.

BoinxTV from Boinx Software

Things from Cultured Code

Versions from Sofa

Student Awards

Wooden Labyrinth 3D from Elias Pietil

Fontcase from Pieter Omvlee

iPhone OS 3.0

AccuTerra Beta from AccuTerra

This last entry is pretty interesting. We saw lots of exciting and innovative apps in the WWDC Keynote on Monday that take advantage of the new features of iPhone OS 3.0, but AccuTerra was not presented there. The technologies utilized in this new hike tracking app are pretty extensive, though. I’m definitely looking forward to checking this out when it becomes available.

For more information about this year’s winners, here are some articles from TheAppleBlog that mention a few of them…

Weekly App Store Picks: March 14, 2009 (Topple 2)

Tweetie for Mac Update: Now With Video Tweeting

Billings 3 Brings Welcome Updates, Fresh Design

BoinxTV: Broadcasting for the rest of us

BoinxTV Now Shipping

Task Management With Things

12 Subversion Apps for OS X

Keep Your Fonts Together With Fontcase

Fonts 201: Font Management Apps for the Mac

Task Management With Things

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Many Mac users are fortunate enough to have more than one machine. Whether it’s a home desktop and laptop, or a home and office machine, it can be very useful to keep some form of continuity between the two systems. This is easy enough to do with individual files — simply using an online service such as Dropbox or Syncplicity to keep everything synchronized between two machines. But what about applications?

This article will explain how easy it is to keep many popular applications in sync between more than one computer. It doesn’t involve putting all your data on ‘the cloud’ — you still have a local copy if a service closes down for any reason. The steps outlined work for the applications noted here, and may well be applicable to a different piece of software you’d like to keep synchronized. We’ve previously written how to achieve something similar for your iTunes library, but will now take the idea a little further, extending it to other apps.

How Does It Work?

Every application on your Mac has some form of preference or library file — this is where all your application data is stored. What this solution proposes is to store this file on the Dropbox server, rather than simply as a local file. It means that whenever the file changes on one computer, the change is automatically copied across to another machine. When you open the app on another Mac, everything should look the same as you left it previously on the other computer.

Is It Secure?

Dropbox is an extremely secure service, encrypting your information before transmitting it across the Internet. In addition, it supports file ‘versioning’ — this means that if you find that your application preferences are accidentally corrupted or overwritten, it’s simple to revert to an older version through Dropbox. If anything, placing your application library or preferences in more than one location is safer that relying on one sole computer.

Existing Solutions

Many of the applications which are bundled with your Mac are able to sync through Apple’s MobileMe service — iCal, Address Book, Mail, Dashboard and Safari Bookmarks for instance. This works great, and you might not need to use the Dropbox strategy for those applications. I’d recommend sticking to MobileMe for these, as it ensures syncing works well with your iPhone or iPod as well as between Macs.

Getting Started

The first step is to create a Dropbox account if you haven’t already. You receive 2GB of storage for free — probably enough for most simple applications — but you can upgrade to more if you’d like to keep a more data-heavy app in sync. The next step is to locate the library file for that application. For the purposes of this walkthrough, I’ll be using Things, a popular task manager.

The location of the library for Things is at:

User > Library > Preferences > Application Support > Cultured Code > Things

The path is likely to be similar for other applications, and a few examples are shown later on.

Moving Files and Syncing with Dropbox

The next step is a little more complicated. Essentially we need to do two things:

1. Move the library into your Dropbox folder
2. Create an ‘alias’ to tell Things where to find the new library location

First, close the application in question — ensure that it is completely shut down. Before you do anything, back up the library or preferences file — I can’t stress enough that you should make a copy of the file(s) you’re planning to move, to ensure that if you make a mistake at any point you’re able to simply put them back as before.

The next step is to move the library to your Dropbox folder, usually User > Dropbox. It should sync as normal.

At the moment, when you open Things it will still look for the library in the original location. This is no good, and we need to create an ‘alias’ in place of the library to point Things to your Dropbox folder. This takes three steps:

1. Right click the ‘Things’ folder in your Dropbox area, and click ‘Make Alias’
2. Move the alias which is created (represented by a folder with an arrow) to the original location: User > Library > Preferences > Application Support > Cultured Code
3. Rename the alias to whatever the original folder or file was called, in this case simply ‘Things’

Here are a couple of screenshots showing a ‘before and after’ view of our library folder:

Showing the original Things folder, before we moved it to Dropbox

After moving the original folder and replacing it with an 'alias', this is what you should see

Opening Things should now work as normal, with the application automatically being redirected to the new location of your library.

Setting Up Your Second Computer

You then need to follow the same process on your other computer. Providing you don’t have any information in the application, delete the library file and create an alias from your Dropbox folder in the exact same way.

I wouldn’t recommend using both computers at the same time as you’re likely to lose data, but moving from one to the other (and closing Things each time) should ensure that your data is kept in sync wonderfully!

Other Applications

Things is simply used as an example here. A few other applications, along with the location of their library/preferences data are:

• Camino: User/Library/Application Support/Camino
• LittleSnapper: Simply alter the library location in the app preferences
• 1Password: Change the library location in the app preferences (more info
• iTunes: See our walkthrough
• Bento: User/Library/Application Support/Bento

Conclusion

I hope you’ve found the walkthrough easy to follow and feel confident to experiment with syncing application preferences and data between your Macs. Providing you always back up your information first, there’s no harm in trying the process out with any of your favorite apps.

I’d be interested to hear how you get on, and do let me know which applications you end up syncing on a regular basis!

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Wednesday at Macworld Expo marked a distinct change from the hectic activity around the keynote and the open of the show floor. The big news today was the announcement of the Best of Show awards from Macworld. The products recognized this year are…

Best of Macworld 2009

• iPhoto ’09
• Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
• Things
• Ecamm Network BT-1 Bluetooth Web Cam
• Filemaker Pro 10
• HP MediaSmart Server
• Livescribe Pulse Smartpen
• Daylite Touch
• Sling Media SlingPlayer for iPhone

Our Impressions

iPhoto ’09 is a great upgrade and worthy of the attention, despite the appearance of Google’s Picassa for Mac as a possible competitor. We love Things around here, and quite a few of us actually use it to try and stay on top of, well, things. We introduced you to the Ecamm Bluetooth Web Cam on Monday. Filemaker Pro 10 is a nice update. I talked to a few developers today that are looking forward to the new scripting features, but the UI overhaul is just something that’s long overdue. Daylite Touch really redefines what an iPhone app is capable of doing. We had a chance to talk with Marketcircle yesterday and will share our impressions of using the app soon. One thing I can let slip now, this is definitely not going to be a $.99 app store purchase. Daylite Touch is a full-featured app that rivals what you can do with a desktop app and you should expect it to be priced accordingly.

The Rest of the Best

The HP MediaSmart Server is a really interesting solution for home users that want to store and share media. SlingPlayer is very cool and something to keep an eye on as soon as it gets released to the app store this quarter. We’ll bring you more info on that announcement soon, along with some details on the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center.

Other Announcements

If you’ve been wondering what happened to the Xserve RAID team after that product was discontinued, several of them have resurfaced at startup Active Storage. I had a chance to talk with Alex Grossman on Wednesday and I am very impressed with the attention to detail, and the particular attention to the needs of Mac users, that Active Storage has put into their products. If you are looking for high-density storage solutions that you can easily manage from the Mac, you may not need to look any further than Active Storage.

Intelliscanner has a new update to their SoHo and Mini scanners. If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to get organized and catalog stuff around your house, you’ll love this little scanners and the accompanying software.

Axiotron recruited Steve Wozniak to demo their new Modbook Pro this week. The Modbook Pro, as the name suggest, is based on the MacBook Pro system just as the Modbook is based on the Apple MacBook.

Ambrosia, one of my favorite developers, is announcing iToner 2 and WireTap Studio 1.0.7 this week. iToner 2 adds three new features: ClearTone to help get the audio levels right so your ringtones always sound great on the iPhone, cropping tools to edit snippets right in iToner, and 40+ professionally mastered ringtones that you can use right out of the box. WireTap Studio has been updated to improve performance and add some new control schemes .

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The latest application from Cultured Code is Things, a task organizer and to-do list manager for Mac and iPhone. It centers around the ideas encompassed in Getting Things Done (GTD) and makes it easy to break down and organize tasks.

Far from being a straight forward To Do list manager, Things provides separation between tasks due now, scheduled for a future date, postponed indefinitely, or completed. Comprehensive features make searching and organizing your tasks a piece of cake.

Features and Function

Things is broken down into a number of different sections:

• Next: The Next list contains single to-dos and action steps from active projects. These are items that you plan on completing in the near future.
• Inbox: This provides a quick way to get an idea out of your head quickly and place it, unfiled, into Things.
• Today: Your list of things you want to complete Today, along with scheduled items which are due today.
• Scheduled: Used for all to-dos that you want to start at a later date. Once that date arrives, they will be automatically moved to Today.
• Someday: A place for ideas you might want to pursue in the future.
• Logbook: Every day when you open Things for the first time, all to-dos completed on the previous day are moved to the Logbook.

The Interface

The user interface for Things has been heralded by many as exquisitely ‘Mac-like’. Icons, colors, graphics and gradients all take on a sleek and professional appearance; Things has an overwhelming sense of quality.

With many applications, you find yourself struggling a little at first to understand exactly how it works. Apple is exceptional at creating apps which just ‘feel’ right, though unfortunately many other Mac developers aren’t quite as intuitive. Thankfully, Things is an app which can be mastered five minutes after opening, on account of the useful tips and comments scattered around the interface.

Things allows you to set a system-wide hotkey to open a “quick-entry” dialog, where you can enter a task, add tags, notes, and decide where to file it. Personally, I find myself much more likely to use an app on a regular basis if the interface inspires and impresses me every time I open it. Things undoubtedly falls into this category.

Things for iPhone

An accompanying application is also available for iPhone. This offers very similar functionality to the desktop version, with identical separate areas for storing tasks. Syncing is facilitated via Wi-Fi when both your iPhone and Mac are on the same network. I don’t believe this is an ideal solution — it would be more practical to sync over whichever network is available (Wi-Fi, 3G, Edge etc) in a similar fashion to Mail or NetNewsWire.

The iPhone version of Things is similarly well designed, with a range of different time saving additions. To Do items can be added to today’s schedule through tapping a ‘star’ icon next to each item, with different colors making it easy to see which items are scheduled, due today, or overdue.

Competitors

While Things has put itself forward as a powerful contender in the GTD software area, it does come up against a number of competing applications. Nick Cernis has conducted an in-depth analysis of the different competing applications.

The essential differences between each app are:

• iGTD2 – Completely free, and designed specifically for GTD. Highlights include tabbing and a menu bar item for adding tasks quickly.
• Midnight Inbox – $35 for a single user license, with features including automation of collecting tasks and a method to check you’re not drifting off track when working.
• OmniFocus – $80 for a single user license. It allows you to easily ‘plan now, focus later’, with a satisfying “clean up” brush — almost as gratifying as crossing a To Do out on a paper pad.

The Road to Release

Things 1.0 is scheduled to be released in just over a week at the 2009 Macworld Expo. The application is available as a free download at present, and will cost $49 when released in January. A $10 discount is available if you subscribe to their email newsletter before the official launch. The team sounds as though they’ll be busy in the run up to Macworld:

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be hard at work finishing up the final features for the 1.0 release. We’ll also be working on some really cool accompanying details, including screencasts and a really cool print ad.

For those of you making the journey to the Moscone Center in San Francisco come January, Cultured Code will be located in the Mac Developer Pavilion (booth #1438).

Conclusion

Things provides a great tool for managing your daily tasks and to dos. It’s simple to quickly put an idea or thought into the application, and the interface provides all the functionality you require without getting in the way.

I’m excited to see the features that will be added in the final version and will certainly be purchasing the application when released. If you’re looking for a tool to accompany an organized lifestyle, Things seems to be a great option.

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