Installation

1. I’ve setup Dropbox to share my Things database betweeen my laptop and a computer at home which is always online.

2. Buy and install Prowl on your iOS device.

3. On the home computer/server, install things-rb:

   $ (sudo) gem update --system # if you're on an older RubyGems version
$ (sudo) gem install things-rb

4. ..and the prowl gem to talk to the Prowl API

   $ (sudo) gem install prowl

5. Save this file somewhere (like ~/bin/prowl_things.rb)

6. Setup a cronjob to run the script as often as you’d like. Mine runs every weekday at 8:45 am.

   45 8 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/ruby /Users/me/bin/prowl_things.rb

I wanted to display my ToDos from Things on the Desktop using GeekTool so I created a command line tool in Ruby (backed by a library) to access the database.

This way you can see what needs to be done but without switching (or even launching Things)

It’s in a pretty early state right now and probably has bugs but I’ve been using it for some days now without problems. I’m planning to add write-support as well (so you can create tasks from the command line if Things isn’t running) but right now it’s read-only.

For more information, check out the README file and source on GitHub or this thread on the Things’ forum