I don’t use Things, but I do question saying an app is stagnating over Apple’s iCloud sync problems. If you need to move on, sure, move on. And I don’t even think you need to lay blame where it belongs… but there’s no need to lay it elsewhere.
The rant is more about its overall stagnation, not about cloud storage per se. Doesn’t Things use its own cloud storage and not iCloud, anyway?
I agree with you about iCloud’s problems, however. iCloud’s the single worst thing Apple has and bottlenecks not just third party apps but the whole OS itself. I’m with John Siracusa where above all they should be eating into their cash trying to make iCloud not suck.
I have used Things since 2008, saw it incrementally evolve over its first few versions, and it was, IMHO, the best to-do app that synced with the desktop for all the years that Apple didn’t offer that possibility (something I never quite understood… I think it wasn’t until iOS 6, with Reminders, that iOS got a pre-installed to-do(-ish) app?) I came to think of it as being a stellar example of iOS design… pre-iOS 7. It’s not their fault Apple decided to revamp the UI. I still use it, and just a couple of days ago was thinking about how it still had the “old” UI, but that doesn’t bother me. I actually like it.
This article sounds to me like someone who needs “innovation” for innovation’s sake. A lot of people just can’t accept that if it ain’t broken, it may not need fixin’.
I agree. I don’t replace my hammer every year. I bought one, it works, I’ll keep it until it can no longer hammer a nail. Why wouldn’t I do the same with software?
I admire Rands very much, but his post sounds a bit like “Bored now.”
I have no idea how a software manager can write a clueless article like this, and how Dalrymple can link to it as if it was somehow thoughtful or useful.
Is it wrong that my mind went straight to Evil Willow here?
Not in the least.
A bit disappointed by the response in the comments… the article lined up perfectly with my experiences with Things, which was my todo app of choice (desktop and iPhone) for many years. It took them too long to solve the sync problem, and by the time they did it felt like the only significant feature to be added over the years.
There’s also the problem with not “stagnating” – a counterpoint:
I used to swear by TinyAlarm. You’d tell it “hey, notify me about a thing” by right clicking (IIRC – it’s been a while) and it’d pop up a little dialog for you to tell it “how long/when” to notify you.
Simply, trivially quick, perfect for many uses. (My canonical one is “leave the computer in N minutes to keep dinner from burning/start cooking the labor-intensive part”.)
But then they “updated” it, after going to the App Store*. Now the workflow takes three times as long for the same task, and if you want it to make a noise? You have to go through several steps and PICK one, rather than having it default to anything sensible, including “whatever you last did”.
I prefer stagnation, when a product does exactly what it needs to exactly the way it needs to.
Maybe, to paraphrase Rands over there, I was “missing the state of the art in notifications” – but that’s not what I even wanted. I wanted “no-overhead, remind me in N minutes”, I had it, and they took it away.
(It’s not just me – I was looking on their forums and reviews to see if I’d missed a simpler UI option, but evidently not.
A fair chunk of the userbase was vocally upset by that “upgrade”, and the developers gave no indicate – at the time I checked – of even having noticed.
If they weren’t on the App Store and had kept the Old Version around, this would not be a significant issue; but it’s a VERY annoying thing to even attempt via the App Store, to keep an Old Version installed without ever wiping it…)
The AppStore has become a weird place. If they do work on updating the look, then heavens forbid do something to charge for the upgrade, will the same people who complained about it stagnating then complain about the upgrade fee?
i bought Things many years ago, but it took way too long for them to roll out a cloud sync solution and new features. The Apple todo list app Reminders is good enough for me — sync is reliable and it has geofencing.
Will be nice to see a follow-up article after a longer period of use.
I went through something similar with iPad RSS Feeds apps around the time of Google Reader shutdown, (was unsure of FeeddlerRSS sticking around). I found a couple that were satisfactory, but nothing that fit my usage like FeeddlerRSS does.
Moved from Things to 2Do a year ago and I don’t look back. Actually I can’t be happier. Rich feature set, versatlity, rapid development, good support, that’s all I can ask for.
I don’t use Things, but I do question saying an app is stagnating over Apple’s iCloud sync problems. If you need to move on, sure, move on. And I don’t even think you need to lay blame where it belongs… but there’s no need to lay it elsewhere.
The rant is more about its overall stagnation, not about cloud storage per se. Doesn’t Things use its own cloud storage and not iCloud, anyway?
I agree with you about iCloud’s problems, however. iCloud’s the single worst thing Apple has and bottlenecks not just third party apps but the whole OS itself. I’m with John Siracusa where above all they should be eating into their cash trying to make iCloud not suck.
I have used Things since 2008, saw it incrementally evolve over its first few versions, and it was, IMHO, the best to-do app that synced with the desktop for all the years that Apple didn’t offer that possibility (something I never quite understood… I think it wasn’t until iOS 6, with Reminders, that iOS got a pre-installed to-do(-ish) app?) I came to think of it as being a stellar example of iOS design… pre-iOS 7. It’s not their fault Apple decided to revamp the UI. I still use it, and just a couple of days ago was thinking about how it still had the “old” UI, but that doesn’t bother me. I actually like it.
This article sounds to me like someone who needs “innovation” for innovation’s sake. A lot of people just can’t accept that if it ain’t broken, it may not need fixin’.
I agree. I don’t replace my hammer every year. I bought one, it works, I’ll keep it until it can no longer hammer a nail. Why wouldn’t I do the same with software?
I admire Rands very much, but his post sounds a bit like “Bored now.”
I have no idea how a software manager can write a clueless article like this, and how Dalrymple can link to it as if it was somehow thoughtful or useful.
http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/11/19/stagnation-or-stability/?utm_source=loopinsight.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed
Apparently, he agrees.
Is it wrong that my mind went straight to Evil Willow here?
Not in the least.
A bit disappointed by the response in the comments… the article lined up perfectly with my experiences with Things, which was my todo app of choice (desktop and iPhone) for many years. It took them too long to solve the sync problem, and by the time they did it felt like the only significant feature to be added over the years.
There’s also the problem with not “stagnating” – a counterpoint:
I used to swear by TinyAlarm. You’d tell it “hey, notify me about a thing” by right clicking (IIRC – it’s been a while) and it’d pop up a little dialog for you to tell it “how long/when” to notify you.
Simply, trivially quick, perfect for many uses. (My canonical one is “leave the computer in N minutes to keep dinner from burning/start cooking the labor-intensive part”.)
But then they “updated” it, after going to the App Store*. Now the workflow takes three times as long for the same task, and if you want it to make a noise? You have to go through several steps and PICK one, rather than having it default to anything sensible, including “whatever you last did”.
I prefer stagnation, when a product does exactly what it needs to exactly the way it needs to.
Maybe, to paraphrase Rands over there, I was “missing the state of the art in notifications” – but that’s not what I even wanted. I wanted “no-overhead, remind me in N minutes”, I had it, and they took it away.
(It’s not just me – I was looking on their forums and reviews to see if I’d missed a simpler UI option, but evidently not.
A fair chunk of the userbase was vocally upset by that “upgrade”, and the developers gave no indicate – at the time I checked – of even having noticed.
The AppStore has become a weird place. If they do work on updating the look, then heavens forbid do something to charge for the upgrade, will the same people who complained about it stagnating then complain about the upgrade fee?
i bought Things many years ago, but it took way too long for them to roll out a cloud sync solution and new features. The Apple todo list app Reminders is good enough for me — sync is reliable and it has geofencing.
Will be nice to see a follow-up article after a longer period of use.
I went through something similar with iPad RSS Feeds apps around the time of Google Reader shutdown, (was unsure of FeeddlerRSS sticking around). I found a couple that were satisfactory, but nothing that fit my usage like FeeddlerRSS does.
Moved from Things to 2Do a year ago and I don’t look back. Actually I can’t be happier. Rich feature set, versatlity, rapid development, good support, that’s all I can ask for.