Things Touch

September 6, 2008

Things Touch is a task manager for the iPhone and iPod touch from the team over at Culture Code. It is the mobile sibling of Things, the desktop task manager for OS X. I’ve been using Things Touch for a couple of weeks now and on the whole the application is well thought out and easy to use. There are a couple of areas where more work is needed, and it is good to see that most of these are promised in future updates.

Once installed, the Things Touch icon is visible on the home screen of the iPhone. Here, it is the icon in the top right corner. The small badge on the icon indicates that I have 5 tasks requiring my attention today. More on that later.

Things Touch launches quickly without the delay experienced with many iPhone applications and you are presented with a clean and well laid out overview of your tasks and quick access to key areas of the application. Subsequent launches of Things Touch will take you to the last screen you were on when you quit the application. This feature is useful at times, but it would be nice to have the option to always default to the Overview or Today screens.

From the home screen you can quickly add a new task by hitting the “+” button in the bottom left corner of the screen. You are also able to view your tasks in a number of ways.

The Today folder shows you all tasks due for completion today. At the start of each day I run through the Inbox and Next folders and mark all the tasks I am going to do today. This gives me quick access to my task list for the day. Tasks scheduled to be done on a particular day (i.e. those with a due date set) will also appear under Today when appropriate.

Adding tasks is simple and can be accessed from most screens. Just hit the “+” button in the lower left hand corner of the screen, enter your task details and hit save. You can file tasks in any folder, but I tend to stick them all directly in the Inbox ready for processing.

Processing tasks from the inbox is relatively straigtforward.You can delete tasks, mark them as complete or assign them to a project. All these actions can also be completed from the individual project pages.

Two special folders are Scheduled and Someday. When you move tasks to the Scheduled folder Things Touch prompts you for a due date. The task will then appear in the Today folder on the relevant date. Someday is for those tasks that you want to postpone for another day.

The folder I use most often and probably the one that I find the biggest disappointment is the Next folder. This shows you a list of next actions for all your projects. From here you can quickly select tasks to tackle today. But, as soon as you have a large number of projects and tasks this screen can become a little unwieldly. It would be nice to be able to filter the screen based on tags/locations/areas and or responsible person. We are promised that some of these features are being considered in future releases of Things Touch. This would significantly improve the usability of Things Touch.

It is worth noting that the task count badge that appears on the Things Touch icon doesn’t actually update itself until you run the application. This is (I presume) a limitation of Apple’s SDK. Just remember to run the application once each morning to ensure you see the correct task count.

This brings me on to desktop synchronisation. On the whole this works well and I haven’t had any problems with it. It would be nice if this sync could take place automatically without having to launch both the desktop version of Things and Things Touch at the same time. I have some ideas here, but synchronisation works well as it stands and over complicating this may cause more issues than it’s worth.

Despite the possibilities for improvement around the Next screen and synchronisation, Things Touch is a well rounded application that does actually work. I have been using it daily now for a couple of weeks and definitely plan to continue doing so.

Things:
OS: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or better
Price: Free whilst in preview ($49 on release)
URL: http://www.culturedcode.com/things/

Things Touch:
OS: iPhone
Price: £5.99
URL: http://culturedcode.com/things/iphone/