Adjustable Text Size Is Important

I have been struggling with my eyesight beginning over the past years. Nothing major - regular aging is the cause (I turned 46 years old this summer). As a result, I have a difficult time seeing contrast in low light, and therefore need to bump up the text size occasionally.

Go big or go home!

I now scrutinize the apps that I work with based on whether they will accommodate for less than perfect eyesight by allowing for text resizing, and I am glad to see the that Things has finally made that an option in the app!

Apps like OmniFocus have had this feature for a while. But while OmniFocus 4 is in development, I have been once again toying with Things to see what changes have been made, and the text (and vector graphic) size adjustment options are a welcome addition.

Cultured Code's Things' interface-scaling graphic from their site.

I really admire that Cultured Code is listening to their users, and have developed a feature like this. It may not seem huge to you, but is an accessibility feature not to be taken lightly. For example, I work on an amazing new 15-in MacBook Air. The screen real estate provides for a spacious app playground. When I ran, say, Fantastical alongside anything prior to version 3.18 of Things, I could scale Fantastical. But I could not scale the text in Things, resulting in a mishmash of word sizing on screen that was not only making it more difficult for me to see the latter app, but visually unappealing also.

All of this is to say that I am now trying out working with Things again, which has some great advantages to its use that have not been matched in another app, like:

  • Checklists

  • Keyboard shortcuts

  • Shortcuts support (great for using templates for projects that have complexity to them)

For these reasons, I will be stacking Things up against the upcoming OmniFocus 4 to see if it holds up. Things’ killer siren song has always been its design. But upon further review, the beautiful interface has more and more useful features with each iterative release of Things 3.

ProductivityEric Bowersthings