We’re all really excited to see how you’ll like it. Here is the first screenshot of redesigned Somethings. Please take a look at these and let us know what you think. We are very interested in your opinion.

First of all, thn.gs is a web application, not the desktop one. Originally our project was inspired by the beautiful Mac OS X application Things by Cultured Code. We wanted to cooperate with them, but it’s not our fault we didn’t. That made us move away from original concept of replicating the look of a desktop application, thn.gs now has it’s own bright future and development plans.

Of course, the new look might be shoking (and some of you already wrote us about it), but it is really the only way it can be.

Do you like the new design? We’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Not from the point of comparing it with the old one, but from the point of usability and actual aesthetical pleasure. You might miss the glamourous shadows, but they aren’t making the design great.

Gears is amazing platform for web-development which expands our representation of web-interface. Gears allows us to create web-applications which can run in standalone mode without any loss in functionality (for example, when connection is temporary lost). 

For example, now you can edit different tasks when you are walking in the park or on your way home. Write down new ideas before you forget them. When internet connection is recovered, thn.gs will immediately automatically synchronize changes with the web-server. 

Click the globe button (it signifies if current mode is online/offline) for changeover to standalone mode. If Gears haven’t been installed yet the dialog box will appear to offer you to install it. Click the Install Google Gears button if you agree.

Installation complete!

You can use all the abilities of the task management working offline. All the data won’t be lost even if the browser will be closed. Click the globe button again to leave the standalone mode (the data will be synchronized with the web-server). The changeover is possible when the connection has been lost too. In that case the dialog box will appear which will suggest you to switch into the offline mode.

Unfortunately, Gears is supported only by one browser – Firefox for now (using the special extension). But not long ago the developers of Safari and Opera announced that they are going to begin implementation of Gears into their products.

It is interesting to mention that at the present time there are very few applications where Gears is supported. May be this is related to difficult implementation of Gears in the classical web-applications. Fortunately, thn.gs has been designed considering division between server API and users interactive web-interface. This solution allowed us to implement Gears without remaking the project all over again.

Gears development was not easy but very interesting experience for us. Various and rather unexpected problems led us to overwriting all of the code responding in Gears several times. This was caused by the conceptual incompatibility in the ideologies of development web-applications and desktop-applications. The unusual technical solutions helped us to make high quality program tier of the interaction with data base in the standalone mode.

Gears is an amazing technology which destroys the verge of web-application and desktop-application. It is very pleasing to realize that our application is at the summit of technical progress.

There are several reasons why our teamwork with CC is impossible: 

• it is very technically difficult to integrate these applications; 
• another reason is that CCs behavior is very unpredictable as we ascertained; 
• and the most important for us is that we want to develop our own application.

We will implement a lot of new important features soon (import/export, e-mail notifications, data search, etc.). 

You can run thn.gs using all the up-to-date browsers in which actual web standards are supported (Firefox 3, Opera, Safari 3, Chrome). Internet Explorer 8.0 will come soon and according to the current information it will be the high quality browser and I hope you will be able to run thn.gs using it too. We haven’t got enough recourses to support old browsers and we think that it isn’t necessary. We don’t see any reason to spend our time for implementing such a thing. Everyone has ability to update the browser.