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Syncing Things Across Multiple Computers with Dropbox Chris Coyier

January 3, 2009

Things is pretty killer to-do list-style productivity software for the Mac. It has a companion iPhone application that is pretty fantastic as well. What it doesn’t have, is the ability to sync itself across multiple computers. At least, out of the box, it doesn’t. I do work both at my home iMac and my laptop, so I REALLY wanted to use Things on both, synced.

Fortunately, keeping Things in sync across multiple computers is a possibility using the amazing Dropbox. This was my first experience really using Dropbox, and it’s really fricking amazing. Far nicer than the .Mac service that I actually pay for. I am basing this short tutorial on what I learned here.

  • Get Things installed on both computers.
  • Get Dropbox installed on both computers.
  • Copy the folder at ~[user]~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/Things into your new dropbox folder, probably at ~[user]~/Dropbox
  • Hold down the Option key when you start Things. You will have the opportunity to choose the location of the database. Do this on both versions of things (making sure you do your version full of data first).

    • You now have a synced version of Things! Dropbox constantly updates, so it stays up to date as soon as you enter anything. Very awesome.

    WARNING: You will want to only be running one version of Things at a time. Otherwise, the out-of-date version might write to Dropbox and overwrite new changes you have made. You’ll be having a little syncing war, which isn’t good. Run only one at a time.

    🤘

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