Focused 1.7 brings all the new features for iOS 18, including lockscreen- and control center widgets, dark and tinted app icons, and even two new app icons styles.
It also improves drag & drop support: You can now drag tasks to other apps, which will receive the drop as text describing the task. And you can drop text from other apps right into Focused. In particular you can drop Tasks from Things and Focused will import them, including their metadata, correctly.
Areas & Inbox
Focused now has a proper Inbox for Tasks. All the tasks that are not assigned to a project AND don’t have a start or planned date are shown there.
Also new are areas which allow you to group your projects. For me that means I can now have an area “Personal” and an area “App Store”, where I have projects for all my apps. Each area can have its own daily task limit, which helps giving all areas appropriate attention when using the automatic clean up feature.
Also, the app allows to focus on just one area, hiding all other areas and tasks while you’re working. That is, if I focus on my “App Store” area, all other projects and tasks are hidden in the sidebar, all lists and in the calendar.
Tags & Filtering
You can assign tags to each tag and use them to filter lists, which is in particular for the today list helpful.
Assigned tasks are shown in lists, and in widgets to give you the needed context, they are only hidden in the calendar view, because of the available space there.
There is a tag editor, and tags can have a hierarchy. Tasks tagged with sub-tags are also shown when a list is filtered for any of the parent tags.
Sub-tags can even be marked as mutually exclusive, like “Bug” and “Feature” in the screenshots here, since a task is always about either a bug or feature, never about both (in my mind, anyway).
Starting Dates
“Next” tasks can now have a starting date, and will not be shown in the today lists before that date.
They’re still intended to be used for smaller things that don’t required a lot of work, but you need to remember to do them anyway. They don’t count towards the daily limit and are hidden (by default) in the calendar.
This change is mostly so that repeating “Next” tasks don’t need to be converted to planned tasks just to have a date assigned, but it’s still helpful for non-repeating tasks too.