The front page has the argument. This page has the working parts — the vault, the way work is filed, templates, two dates kept apart, a calendar that only touches its own events, and every way to get a task in.
Passport and license numbers. Insurance cards, front and back. Account and policy numbers, an alarm code, a password or two. Most of us keep them in Notes, or as a photograph of a card that never gets deleted.
Off until you turn it on. Every item is encrypted on your device before it is saved, with a key that lives in your own iCloud Keychain. There is no server, and nobody here can see inside.
Said plainly, because it matters
A locked drawer, not a bank. Your 6-digit code is a lock on the door, not the key to the safe — forget it and the vault survives, because the key that does the encrypting lives in your keychain.
Nobody here can reset it either. There is no server and no account to reset it from. That cuts both ways and you should know which.
The app makes you read what the vault does and does not protect before it will turn on.
The passcode is checked by the device and never seen by Thingist. It locks itself again when you leave — straight away, or after 1, 5 or 15 minutes.
Give a passport or a card its expiry date and Thingist writes the task to renew it — one, three or six months ahead, with the item attached to it.
On iPhone and iPad it flattens the picture the way the Notes scanner does and reads the printed text on the device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Where it never goes The Watch, widgets, Spotlight, Siri, Shortcuts, or a shared list. Backups carry it still encrypted, and never the key.
An area is for the parts of your life, and it carries its own color and its own mark. Every task inherits both, so a glance at any list tells you which part you’re looking at — before you have read a word.
An area holds sub-areas and projects, and a sub-area can hold projects of its own. Go three deep when a job needs it: Oak Street has a punch list of its own, a kitchen in it, and a trim-out inside the kitchen.
Preview
Color
Icon
Either one. The picker remembers which you chose.
Try it. Twelve colors, and your own picture in place of the symbol.
Put a project straight in the area when that’s all it needs, or nest it a level further down when the job is bigger. A sub-area inherits its parent’s color, so a whole side of your life reads as one thing.
Each area keeps its own working hours, because first thing in one business is not first thing in another. Weekends included.
A lot of our work is stuff we do over and over. Build the shape once and Thingist lays it back down on real dates — and it hangs off two of them, so a step can count forward from the day you start or backward from the day it has to be finished.
Thingist ships with no templates. Every one is built by you, around the way you actually work — the template you need, not the template you were given.
Run a template and you get a project with its steps already in it, already dated, already filed in the area the template belongs to.
Files on a template turn up on every task it makes. Any task can hold files, a web link, notes and a checklist — the template just brings its own along.
Because the app knows which end of the job each step belongs to, and a delayed completion was never going to move the day the dumpster arrived.
If your list only holds one date, the day you guessed you might get to something becomes the day you’re late — and it fills up with red that never meant anything.
Thingist keeps them apart. When you plan to do it is yours to move as often as the week moves — Today, This Evening, a date, Anytime, Someday, or straight back to the Inbox. The deadline is the date the world cares about, and it doesn’t budge because you got busy.
When
When you plan to do it. Separate from the deadline below — that’s the date the world cares about.
Deadline & reminder
A deadline shows on the row and in Today. A reminder is a separate switch, because a due date and a nudge are not the same thing either.
Actual panel. Both switches off is a perfectly good task.
Rain stopped the job. Move the plan. The deadline has not changed and neither has anything you promised.
It shows on the row and in Today. The reminder is a separate switch you turn on when you actually want one.
Whichever the job actually is. Completing a repeating task logs it and creates the next one.
A list says what you meant to do. A calendar says what you already promised. Kept apart, you plan a day that was never available.
Thingist puts your work and your real appointments on the same days, and tells you how much of today the calendar has already taken.
Switch it on and every dated task gets a block in a calendar of its own. Drag that block to another day in Apple Calendar and the task moves with it. Stretch the block and the task stays where it is — the block just keeps the length you gave it.
Everything it writes lives in a calendar of its own. Hide it with one switch, or delete the lot, and not a single real appointment is at risk.
Nothing is written anywhere until you switch it on yourself, and switching it off takes the calendar and its contents with it.
Change time zone and Thingist asks what you want done with anything you had given a time to. It does not know where you are, and it does not decide for you.
Set a reminder for two o’clock when you are on a site visit until three and it says what you are in, until when, and offers the first time you are actually free. It stops you rather than forbidding you — sometimes the reminder is for the meeting.
Nothing is required but the words. No project to pick, no priority to set, no date you have to invent before it will let you save. Type the thing and press Add. Everything else is waiting on the task when you want it, and most of the time you never will.
Thingist reads what you already wrote — the area, the day, the time, whether you said it was important, and your tags. The same parser runs everywhere, so it never matters where you were standing when you remembered.
Control Center on a roof. The share sheet from an email. A widget, Spotlight, Siri, or a thingist:// link from Shortcuts, Alfred or a browser bookmark. Paste six lines in and you get six tasks. Point Thingist at one Reminders list and anything that lands there arrives in your Inbox.
One thing no app can fix, said plainly. A free-form “Hey Siri, remind me…” always goes to Apple’s Reminders — an iOS rule, not a gap in Thingist. Name the app and it comes here. Or point Thingist at a Reminders list and it takes whatever lands there, which is how something dictated in the truck ends up in the right place.
It reads what Todoist, TickTick and others export, detects the familiar columns and lets you map the rest. If the list looks like a job you repeat, it offers to turn it into a template and helps you set the anchors.
CSV opens in any spreadsheet. JSON is the whole picture — areas, sub-areas, templates, checklists, waiting-on and saved views. Your data is never locked in here.
Sending it isn’t finishing it. Thingist counts the days on everything sitting in somebody else’s hands.
Ask about the beta