Great Moments by Design – Things

Since I’ve been focused on GTD lately, it’s fitting that the subject of today’s edition of Great Moments by Design is a task management application. I’d like to talk about one of my favorite apps – Things by Cultured Code.

What separates this application from other task management applications are the small design touches. The items mentioned here today are great in two ways: the designers of Things have incorporated small features that increase usability and are great looking.

Today and Items With a Due Date

If you are a Mac user and are not familiar with Things, I encourage you to check it out. For those who have looked at this app before, you may be familiar with its breakdown of focus.

In the sidebar under the Focus source list you have four sections (the same basic idea as smart folderslists in OS XiTunes). I’ll go into the others in detail in my review of Things in another post, but I want to focus here on the Today smart list, shown on the left:

I love the Today section because it fits well with my workflow. I like to have a small list of my big rocks for each day. This basically consists of items that are the highest priority for me for that day. Things does this well by allowing you to assign any individual task the Today label.

And the feature that I missed at first is that Things automatically adds items with due date to the Today source list on the date they are due. in addition, items that are due get highlighted in red. You can also see the breakdown of items in the source list as seen in shot above.

Today I have 6 tasks listed, 2 of which are due (or overdue). When you click on the Today smart list, you get the full breakdown as shown here:

The intuitive way that the application updates your tasks is great for the user. And the small interface touches have been well thought out and increase the pleasure of using the app.

Project Completion

One other small touch that bears mentioning is the summary project view as seen here:

The nice touch here is seen in the summary of progress that has been made in each project.You can see the number of tasks in each project, and the differing shades of blue give a quick indicator of how many are completed.

This kind of visual update has great potential to be implemented in a clunky fashion. Things does it in sleek fashion.


Things is already a great application and is only in beta. The crew at Cultured Code obviously understand strong design principles like simplicity. I’m really looking forward to the 1.0 version and giving these guys some of my money.