Things 3.24.1 Mac

You open your laptop on Monday morning, tap the Touch Bar to pull up your Today list, and drag a few emails into Things to turn them into tasks with deadlines before the coffee kicks in. The Mac app has quietly handled to‑do lists for years, and as of version 3.24 it still asks for surprisingly little from your machine.

macOS 10.15 plus a Things Cloud account

The current build runs on any Mac with macOS 10.15 or later, on both Apple Silicon and 64‑bit Intel hardware. Cultured Code requires a free Things Cloud account for sync — Handoff and Share actions tie the desktop to an iPhone or iPad without extra steps. If you depend on automation, AppleScript support is baked in, and the app speaks nine interface languages including English, German, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Notes, deadlines, and an extra‑tall widget

Tasks can carry notes, subtasks, deadlines and reminders, while projects corral larger goals into manageable steps. Notification Center widgets surface your lists, and the new extra‑tall widget gives a longer view of the day. Spotlight integration, added in 3.24, means a quick ⌘‑Space search pulls up a task without opening the app, and the update also refines snooze options and introduces Siri AI support on OS 27.

A morning session, step by step

You start with the Inbox, not a blank document. While reading overnight messages, you hit the global quick‑entry shortcut — Control‑Space by default on a Mac — and type three lines: “Reply to Lars about Q4 numbers,” “Check printer cartridge stock,” and “Draft slide deck outline.” Each one lands in the Inbox with no category, no date, just raw text. You close the mail client and switch to Things.

The Inbox holds seven items now. You drag the first onto Today so it shows up in the Notification Center widget. The second gets a deadline of Friday and a tag called Office because it involves the supply closet. The third becomes a project: you highlight it, press ⌘-Return, and a new project panel opens where you add three headings — “Research,” “Structure,” “Design notes” — and drag placeholder tasks under each. The whole sorting pass takes under two minutes. By the time you open the Today list, only the tasks you actually intend to move forward are sitting there, and the extras wait in Upcoming or their respective Areas.

Later in the day you activate Siri on the Mac and say, “Remind me to water the office plants tomorrow morning.” The request routes through Things because of the Siri AI hook added in 3.24, and the task appears with a morning time slot in the Upcoming view, complete with a calendar event showing alongside it. You do not touch the app for that one at all.

The Mac app works solo — no iPhone required

One common question is whether the Mac version can stand alone without an iPhone or iPad. It can. The desktop app holds all the same lists, projects and tags. Sync through Things Cloud is optional for those who work on a single Mac, and Handoff simply goes unused if there is no other device to hand off to.

Another question revolves around speed, especially with large project lists. Because the database stays local and only syncs deltas, opening a project with 80 tasks and multiple headings feels immediate, even on older Intel Macs running Catalina. Spotlight indexing, added in 3.24, does not slow launch times either — the app registers its items with the system indexer in the background after the first run.

People also ask about learning the keyboard shortcuts. The essential ones — quick entry, moving a task to Today, toggling the sidebar — are discoverable in the menu bar, and the rest build muscle memory within a few days. The app does not hide commands behind multiple modifier keys.

Planning a small event from start to finish

Imagine a neighbourhood block party that needs to come together in ten days. You create an Area called “Home” if it does not exist yet, then add a project titled “Block party — June 15.” Inside the project, you break the work into three sections: “Permits and paperwork,” “Supplies,” and “Volunteer calls.” Each section gets three or four tasks. The permit task carries a deadline three days out and a reminder the night before. The supply list uses subtasks for balloons, folding tables, and trash bags, so checking off smaller items does not muddy the main task.

You tag everything with BlockParty and a second tag Weekend for the tasks that can only happen on Saturday. On Friday evening, you open the Upcoming view, which now shows the permit deadline alongside your regular calendar events, and you see that the tent pickup conflicts with a dentist appointment. You drag the tent task to the following morning, and the change syncs to the cloud. By Sunday night, the project shows seven completed items, two still waiting, and zero missed deadlines. The extra‑tall widget on the desktop gives you that same project status at a glance without opening the main window, so you spot the remaining supply run while checking the weather.

Things 3.24.1 brings the developer’s latest stability refinements and routine corrections to the Mac.

• macOS 10.15 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit