- Time Tracking on the Mobile Version
- Improved print view
- Small improvements to the web version to work better with the iPad
- New tag selection screen when editing a task
- Pagination for the activity feed
- Improvements to email notifications

Today we’re also releasing another feature we’ve been working on:

File Attachments

It’s now possible to share files in your team by attaching files to comments on tasks. See the following screenshots for an overview:

Add attachments to comments in the discussion on tasks.

Attachments also show up in the recent activity feed.

Just like creating new tasks and comments by sending an email to addtask@thymer.com, you can now also send file attachments directly to Thymer! Links to attachments will also show up in email notifications you receive from Thymer.

All existing accounts will receive some storage space for free:

• Free accounts: 100MB
• Professional: 512MB
• Small Team: between 1 and 5 gigabyte
• Business Team: between 5 and 15 gigabyte

You can find your storage quota and how much space you’ve used on the settings page.

Last, but not least…
Finally, we’re also working on a new product! We’re very excited about it and we’re going to make an announcement soon!

When creating a report for “All” projects, or “All” users, a new option appears: “Group by project”, or “Group by user”. For example, to see how much time Emily spent on which project in June, we can now select “Emily”, 6/1 through 6/30, “All” projects, and “Group by projects”. The report will still be grouped by date, but first by project, showing sub totals per project.

Example of a report of time spent by Peter in May&June. Grouped by project.

More notification settings
For those of you who like to receive email updates about changes and comments made by team members, you can enable email notifications under Settings > Email me at team activity. One option is to receive email for all updates. If you only want to track tasks you delegated to others, select “On, only for tasks I delegated to others”. A new option, “only for tasks for which I’m responsible” can be used to only get email notifications about your own tasks.

Export
Some users asked us if we could add an option to export the task list. This can be useful for various reasons, whether you want to have an offline copy or maybe keep old versions of your task list for administrative purposes. We now added this feature, which you can access under Settings > Account.

Import from external iCal feed
Another request was to make it easier to import tasks from other services. We now added preliminary support for importing tasks from services which offer iCal export, such as Remember the Milk. This option, too, can be found under Settings > Account.

What’s next
The last few weeks we’ve also been working on an API, which we plan to release soon. Stay tuned!

To give tasks a start and end time you can use tags like these:

If you want to specify the start and end time for a task you also have to give the task a due date. So “Attend sales seminar @4-6pm” will not work (4pm on what day?) but “Attend sales seminar @tomorrow @4-6pm” will work.

Calendar improvements

- The start and end times also show up on your calendar.
- You can now use “only show tasks with a deadline” to keep the clutter from your calendar

Now you can see when events start on your iPhone, and you can get alerts as well

Tip: Free SMS/text notifications

If you synchronize your Thymer appointments with Google Calendar you can get text notifications for free.

Google Calendar

SMS notifications have saved us on more than one occasion, and you can’t beat the price! Thanks Google!

Minor search improvements

A few of our users requested a few more special tags to make it easier to find their tasks, so now you can also use the following tags:

That’s it for today. More news coming soon!

A quick 3 minute introduction to Thymer for the iPhone!

Project list

After you log in you get to the project tab. Here you can switch between accounts, select whose task list you want to view and navigate to the recent activity feed. At the very bottom you’ll find a search box, which works just like search in the regular version of Thymer.

Task Details

When you select a task you go to the task details tab. Here you can assign the task to somebody else, mark it complete, toggle flags (discuss/billable/important/waiting for) and add tags. Tags you’ve used before are recommended automatically to save you some typing. Add or remove tags with just a tap of your finger. At the bottom of the page you can discuss the task with your team members or add some notes for yourself.

Recent Activity Feed

Want to keep track of your team on the road? That’s where the Recent Activity Feed comes in. Here you can follow discussions, see which tasks have been completed and so on.

Offline Use (experimental)

When you’re not connected to the internet (or if you’re using an iPod touch) the web app will automatically start in offline mode. In Offline Mode you can access your tasks and projects (providing you’ve accessed them before) and check the recent activity feed. However, you cannot make changes to tasks, nor can you search for them.

How to get it

Go to http://m.thymer.com with your mobile browser and log in. Check the box “iPhone version” or “Android version” on the login page. For the best experience with the iPhone, add the app to your home screen after you’ve logged in. You can do this by clicking on the + icon on the bottom of the mobile Safari window. Then select “Add to Home Screen” to turn Thymer into a one-click app with support for offline use.

One of Thymer’s main features is the ability to quickly add new data without having to go trough countless menus and confirmation buttons. That’s why tasks can be added by just typing in what comes up, like “do groceries @tomorrow @john”. All kinds of information can be entered this way: tags, projects, delegation, etc. If you don’t feel like typing or learning these shortcuts, that’s fine too. Although assigning tasks to projects and users without shortcuts was already possible, we’re now introducing a new task menu that brings all possible task options in one convenient option bar. This way you can set all the advanced options with just a few clicks.

You can find the menu by clicking Options -> Advanced Add. If you want to use this menu by default, go to Settings -> Lists & Menus and select “Show “Advanced Add” menu by default.”

The new project selection menu is now also available in the Edit menu.

Archive Projects

If a project is finished,  on hold or rarely accessed, you can now archive the project and all its tasks. The most recent changes and reports will still be visible, but the project will no longer appear in your project list. As long as the project is archived, adding or editing tasks for this project is not possible. In case you have a limited projects plan: archived projects do not count against your total number of projects.

To restore the project, click + (Add Project) -> Show archived projects…

.. and select the project you wish to restore.

Task Colors

Like assigning colors to projects, it’s now also possible to assign colors to tasks. If you select a color for a task, the row in your task list will be highlighted with that color. This way you can mark special kinds of events and tasks.

Select a color from the Edit Dialog. To create a task with a color, use one of the following keywords: @colorgreen, @colorred, @colorblue, @colorcyan, @coloryellow.

Example of task with red highlighting

Project Titles

In Thymer, projects have a short name (‘project tag’), and a longer (optional) description. The short name is used to keep the project list and task list shorter, and to quickly add new tasks to a project by typing in the project tag. As the description can provide some important details to a project, this description is now shown when you hover over the project in the project bar.

iCalendar support

Viewing your Thymer task list with dates in your favorite calendar application is now possible! If you use calendar software with support for the iCal format (such as Google Calendar, Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook), you can subscribe to an iCal feed of your Thymer task list. You can either subscribe to an iCal feed of a specific project, or to the tasks of all projects. Select the project you wish to get an iCal feed for, and click Options -> Subscribe to iCal.

If you use week day sections in Thymer, tasks in your calendar will be shown on the day they are scheduled in Thymer. For all other date sections, tasks are shown according to their deadline. Tasks that aren’t scheduled on a specific date yet, or have no deadline, are excluded from the iCal feed.

iCal on the iPhone

and in Outlook

That’s it for now. Hope you enjoy these new features! More news next week!

Export of Reports to Excel

Reports can now be exported to Excel, using either the CSV (Comma Separated Values) or HTML format. For our European users that write numbers like “1.000,50″, rather than “1,000.50″, we added the option ;CSV, which stands for Semicolon Separated Values (as the comma is used to decimal values).

Although CSV is the more traditional way of importing data into Excel, the advantage of HTML is that all character sets are supported. This means you shouldn’t have any problems with non-English languages.

To export, simply create or open a Report, click ‘Export’ and select the format. To import the file in Excel (or any other spreadsheet program), just click Open and select the file.

Note: in Business Teams, only people with the ‘Billing’ permission are allowed to Export reports.

New Export menu

Excel HTML output. Simply Open in Excel to import.

Export of Reports to MoneyBird

This feature is mainly for our Dutch users, that are using MoneyBird. MoneyBird is a nice web application from another Dutch company, for easily organizing, managing and sending invoices. You can now directly convert your Thymer Report into a MoneyBird invoice, simply by clicking ‘Export’ and selecting the ‘MoneyBird’ option. You will be forwarded to MoneyBird where you can login and authorize Thymer to create a new invoice for you.

An invoice in MoneyBird, as exported by Thymer

Updated ‘More..’ Projects Dialog

We also refreshed the design of the More projects dialog. As before, Thymer displays as many projects on top as fit on your screen. All other projects go in the “More” dropdown. You can turn on or off the dropdown in Settings -> Lists & Menus. Here you can also change the order of your projects, so that the projects you access most are always shown on top. Depending on how many projects you have, and the resolution of your screen, the More projects dialog now shows your projects in one, two or three columns. We hope this gives a much better overview. It also completely colors the project titles. To make it easier to select a project from the dropdown menu, you can use the full width of a project row to click on it.

Just a few more projects. Shown in one column.

Some more projects, in two column mode. With three columns, you can easily choose between 50 or more projects.

New permissions

We received some feedback of users who wanted to use Thymer as a tool for issue management. Some users should be allowed to report new issues, but not change their status and edit them. We therefore added a new permission level to projects, between “View & Comment” and “Full Access” – “View, Comment & Add”.

We hope you like the new additions!

Hourly Rates
When tracking time, it’s now possible to use hourly rates for billable tasks. You can create as many different rates as needed. When opening the time track pane, a drop down appears with the various rates (if the task is billable). It’s also possible to assign a default rate to a certain project. This rate will then be selected by default. As one of our goals is to keep Thymer as simple as possible, using hourly rates is entirely optional. If, on the other hand, you work a lot with billable tasks, we also made things a bit easier: you can now make projects billable by default. Every new task added to this project is made billable by default.

You can set Billing options for a project by clicking ‘More options’

The rates only specify the amount per hour, not the currency. A default can be set per project, as well as globablly. You can add as many different kinds of currencies as needed. A currency is simply a label, so if for some reason you find it convenient to use kilometers or miles as a currency, go ahead.

Set currency, default rate, and project billable flag.

Specify as many rates as needed.

We also introduced a new permission: Billing. Only users with the Billing permission can add, edit and remove hourly rates. Users without the permission can only select which rate to use for their time tracking entries, and they won’t be able to see the actual rates, only the descriptions. (Billing permission is always enabled for users with a Small Team or Professional account).

New Billing settings tab, accessible by users with Billing permission.

Improved Time Tracking
Besides selecting an hourly rate for billable changes, we introduced some other improvements to the time tracking dialog. Next to using a timer, or manually typing in the number of spent hours, it’s now possible to enter the amount of hours by selecting a begin and end time. “Previous entry” selects the end time of the previous change entry. Also new is the ability to toggle the billable flag from inside the time tracking pane. Furthermore, the timer can now be paused! If you click the ‘pause’ button under the timer, the timer is paused and the dialog is hidden. When you click the “play” button for this task again, the timer resumes. The timer is also automatically paused if you click the “play” button for another task. This way, if you’re working on a task, but you’re interrupted by another task, you can simply switch back and forth. Another new option is to track time for past dates, by using the new calendar control in the time track pane.

Improved Time Tracking: Rates, Pause/Resume Timer, Toggle Billable flag, Begin/end time.

New Reports

The reports feature has been updated to use the new hourly rates. Reports now show prices for billable tasks and projects. This way you can keep track of project budgets, or use it to bill clients or as a template for invoices. Reports created by users without the billing permission do not include the price, only the rate descriptions.

A report of different projects with different rates and currencies is also possible.

Feed Preview

To make it easier to keep track of recent changes by other team members, we introduced a Feed summary on the Task List page.

Other fixes and changes

- If you use the Notification Email feature, you’ll notice that we changed the format of these emails a bit. It shows more useful information in the subject line and name now, and you can jump right into comments.

- It’s now possible to collapse and expand the date separators of other team members (this will not affect their preferences)

- Some users reported problems with the project tabs under Webkit browsers (Safari / Chrome) under Snow Leopard. It showed some weird black lines, and only in these browsers and only in Snow Leopard. This was a really strange bug (a problem with the PNG image format). Thanks everyone for the feedback.

- Date separators now show both the begin and the end date of the date section.

- If no end date is selected for a Report, “Today” is used as default.

Hope you enjoy the new features. We’ll be back soon with more feature news!

Of course we’ve also been working on new features. Rather than looking back on last year, we’d like to give you a hint of some things to come in the first few months of 2010!

Improved Time Tracking & Billing

The time tracking control will make it even easier to keep track of your time: the timer can be paused, and resumed as you switch between tasks. We’re also adding support for (hourly) rates so you can use reports to keep track of your project budgets. We expect to launch this feature within the next few weeks.

iPhone version
We all want to access Thymer on the go, so an iPhone optimized version is in development.

Team improvements
Currently, two major improvements are planned. First of all, we’re going to add a way for people with professional accounts to work together. Secondly, we’re going to add an additional restricted user level. The users will have very limited rights and will not count as full team members (meaning they also won’t count for your team’s user limit). This account type can be used to invite clients to comment on and keep track of projects they are involved in.

API
We’re still working out the details but we’re quite excited about the possibilities of linking Thymer to other applications and vice versa.

.. and much more
We have many more plans and we’re really happy with the support so far. That’s why one of our activities this month was sending you a thank you!

Coffee, ink and cards

Pile 1 of many ;)
Happy holidays and a happy new year everybody!

]]> http://blog.stunf.com/approaching2010/feed/ 4 http://blog.stunf.com/new-feature-easier-planning-with-improved-date-separators/ http://blog.stunf.com/new-feature-easier-planning-with-improved-date-separators/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:51 +0000 wim http://stunf.com/blog/?p=687 We’re glad to announce a new feature today. A little while back we put up a poll to ask your opinion on what this feature should look like. The outcome was pretty clear, so we got to work. This feature will make it easier to create a more detailed schedule for your tasks, and allows you to focus on the most important parts on the list. It’s now available for all plans, free and paid.

Calendar meets task list
The poll question was about the order in which the date separators and tasks are shown. Should we first display the date separator, followed by the tasks planned for this day/period, or, should we leave the order untouched and first show the tasks and then the separator. It turned out the majority preferred the date to be displayed first, like a regular calendar.

More date separators (Weekdays, Within two weeks, Month and Someday)
Before there were two “date separators” – Today & This Week – that could be dragged up and down, thereby creating a schedule for your tasks. We are now adding the option to add more of these separators: one for every day of the week, within two weeks, within 30 days and “someday”. This will allow you to create a more detailed planning for the upcoming week. It also enables you to put tasks that require no immediate action further back, into the new Someday section. Which separators you want to show can be changed easily. If simply dividing your tasks between today, this week or someday is enough, and the rest just feels unnecessary to you, then you can leave your settings untouched. If you’d prefer to make a more detailed schedule, you can simply select the separators you want to add, using the new Add Date Separator menu.

Collapse and expand sections

Usually not all tasks require immediate action. Some might have a deadline, but not until a few weeks from now, so the tasks are not of immediate concern. You’ll probably also have a bunch of tasks that you want to do eventually, but you have no idea when. You can now place those tasks in the “someday” section and forget about them. In that case you may want to a weekly review of those tasks, and see which have become more important or urgent, and drag those up.

Most Thymer users add more tasks to Thymer than they complete (and we’re no exception), so every week the task list grows longer and longer. That’s why we’re now introducing an option to collapse and expand the different date sections on your task list, as marked by the date separators. If you click on the black triangle next to Today, Someday or any other separator, that section will be collapsed. Just toggle the triangle to show that part of your list again. As before, tasks with due dates are moved up to their corresponding date section every night, so even if you leave your Someday section collapsed, the tasks that are due soon will eventually float to the top of your list. Thymer will remember which parts of the list you’ve collapsed.

@someday
To quickly add a task to the bottom of the list, we already introduced the @last tag before (e.g “Some task @last”). We’re now introducing the @someday tag. It is similar to @last, but instead of adding the task to the bottom of the list, it will put the task at the top of your Someday section.

What’s next
As announced earlier, we’re currently finishing a first iPhone version of Thymer. We’re also working on many new other features, ranging from managing project time budgets to collaborating with clients, but more about that later. For now, hope you’ll enjoy the new features and have a nice weekend.

So that’s what this blog post is going to be about. First we explain what the new feature is about, and then we’d like to hear which of the alternatives you like best.

The Feature
To plan your tasks, two date separators are currently visible in your task list: “Today” and “Week”. Right now, all tasks placed above the today separator are today’s work, all tasks placed between the Today and Week separators are due this week, and all tasks below the week separator are tasks you want to do eventually.

We’re now going to add more separators: one for every day of the week, one for tasks within 14 days, within 30 days and “Someday” (something GTD’ers should be familiar with). You can turn these separators on and off at any time in a new “Edit Date Separators” pane. Also new is the ability to collapse or expand sections of your task list. For example, collapsing the Someday section keeps your list short and lets you focus on your next actions.

The Alternatives
So, what about the alternatives? Currently, the tasks planned for a certain date appear above the separator (e.g. all tasks planned for today appear above the “Today” pointer, all tasks planned for Tuesday above the Tuesday pointer, etc.). If a section is collapsed, the items above are hidden. The options:

Alternative 1



Tasks planned for a certain date are above the separator. “Someday” will always be at the bottom of the list. Clicking the up arrow collapses the tasks in the section right above the separator. This approach makes Thymer more like a timeline where the Today separator marks the end of the list of tasks you want to do today, and marks the start of the tasks you want to do the rest of the week.

Alternative 2



Tasks planned for a certain date are below the separator. “Today” will always be at the top of the list. An extra “Someday” separator will mark the end of the planning for this “Week”. Clicking the down arrow collapses the tasks below the separator. This approach makes Thymer more like a calendar, where you find the tasks you want to do today under Today, the tasks you want to do this week under the Week separator and so on.

So what do you think?

1. I strongly prefer tasks show above the separator (Alternative 1)
2. I slightly prefer tasks show above the separator (Alternative 1)
3. I strongly prefer tasks show below the separator (Alternative 2)
4. I slightly prefer tasks show below the separator (Alternative 2)
5. I don’t care

The easiest way to vote is to twitter us, email us or just leave a comment here: just send 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to @stunf, team@stunf.com or post it as a comment below. Thanks!

If you want to explain why you think one solution is superior, or if you have a completely different idea, let us know!

Available soon – Let us know which you like best!
This feature should make organizing your tasks even easier, and close the gap between a calendar and a task list even further. Let us know what you think, and we’ll launch this soon! (available for all plans, free & paid)

In short: it’s been really busy and great! The launch went better than we expected, 7 minutes after going live we got our first customer! As with our beta launch we got a lot of nice reactions, thanks everyone! We got over 60 subscriptions in the first week (but more users, as some customers are a team), including families, hobbyists, independent contractors, companies, and other organizations such as charities.

So, let’s get to the numbers:

We had sales every single day, and that was a big relief. We knew big fluctuations between day to day sales numbers are to be expected, but we didn’t expect the first and last two days of the first week to bring in 80% of all sales.

We’re really happy about this!

Road to the launch
To give some more insight into how we went from idea to launch, this is roughly what we’ve been through in the past year and a half.

Idea (Summer 2008)
Before Thymer we’ve been working on other projects, and it’s always been challenging to keep a good overview of our responsibilities and keep track of what’s going on, especially as we were usually working from different cities and countries. Of course we tried every product for task and project management we could find, but none of them felt right for us. So we developed our own ideas about what we really wanted the software to do and asked ourselves if maybe this would be a nice product for other people to use as well. We didn’t want to become too distracted though (eventually the other project didn’t really work out, but that’s a different story), but our hands were itching and it became a little side-project… So, during the summer we made a lot of sketches about what the system might look like. We still weren’t too convinced it was worth turning this into a product. Inspired by the Four Hour Work Week-approach (the first sketches and brainstorming happened somewhere on the beach), we decided we would only create a very limited prototype, launch a demo video, and see what happens.

Demo video / Splash page (October 2nd, 2008)
The prototype was ready (ready enough to make a video about it, not to use it :) and we made a demo video. We put up a splash page with a description about Thymer, the screencast and an input box for collecting email addresses for interested people. We were very happy about receiving the first 50 email addresses of interested people almost right away. We got some very nice feedback from the start, which encouraged us to develop it further. For months we spent days and nights working very hard to go from a prototype to a beta product we hoped people would love to use. At this point we thought we would be only a couple of months away from a commercial launch.

Sneak Preview (very limited beta) (March 2009)
In March our beta list (people who signed up for the beta) grew to thousands of addresses, and we decided to send out a first small batch, to see what the initial reactions would be and to see if any weird problems would arise (nope, none did). Again, lots of positive feedback and lots of suggestions for improvement. We decided to polish Thymer a bit more, before we would invite everybody on the list into our private beta. You only have one opportunity to make a first impression after all. Launch not too early, launch often; so to speak.

Private Beta (May 2009)
We launched our private beta and sent out emails to some blogs if they were interested in giving Thymer a try; we also included beta keys for their readers. We got quite some press and thousands of visitors, who all wanted to try the beta! We also got mentioned in a paper magazine (.net developers). For some reason seeing Thymer mentioned on a big blog and in a paper magazine made it feel so surreal.

Preparing for launch (Jul – Oct 2009)
With many beta users using Thymer, we got quite some feedback, thanks again everyone! More and more people found their way to our beta list, as we were mentioned more on other blogs and twitter. Now the crucial question: would enough people love Thymer enough to actually pay for it? So far the feedback was great, but of course we need paying customers to survive. During the months leading up to the launch we worked on adding many features (features we were missing ourselves and features that were requested often). Next to all the coding, we worked out pricing plans and our subscription backend. A phase with more questions than answers: “Is the price right?”, “Is it easy enough to change from a beta to a free or paid plan?”. We kept testing and refining, and finally decided it was really time to find out: launch! And that brings us to where we are right now.

Our goals
We’re ecstatic about our start, and the feedback and sales are really encouraging! In the next few months we hope to become ramen profitable (meaning we make just enough to cover basic living expenses and operating costs for Thymer). This would open up all kinds of new possibilities, like, maybe, an upgrade for our company transportation:

Taken last year in front of my apartment. Winter is around the corner, so we better hurry :)

What’s Next
So what are we working on now? This week we’re launching a major new feature, making it easier to plan and manage longer task lists. And, we have some more news about the iPhone version. Other features are also in the pipeline, more about that soon!

We’re launching!

Since we started our Private Beta back in early April this year Thymer has come a long way. We’ve added many features (Team Support, Permissions, Search, Email notifications, Twitter Integration and much more) and we’ve fixed countless of bugs. And now finally, we’re think we’re ready to remove the Beta label.

But first, some new features!

Branding

You can now change the appearance of Thymer to make it fit better in your organization. You can put your own logo in the top left corner, add text to the log in screen, and you even get to pick own subdomain. In this example, http://acnecorp.thymer.com

SSL

The more people rely on the Thymer, the more important a secure connection to our servers becomes. So from now on users can access Thymer securely via SSL.

New Website

What can I say? It really speaks for itself (if it doesn’t — we’re doing something wrong)! It has a feature tour, buzz page and a page where we explain all the different subscriptions.

Subscription Plans

Last but not least — you can now order (and pay for) Thymer! There are at the moment 4 different kinds of subscriptions. Professional, Small Team, Team, and Free. Of course, we also have a comparison page between of different subscriptions. See screen shot below.

What happens to us Beta users?

You’ll get an email today and a page will pop up the first time you log in. In short: you get an extra fully-featured 30 days to either pick a subscription or a Free Account. Sign ups within 7 days get an extra lifetime discount.

So what’s next?

To start with? An iPhone version, iCal and Google Calendar integration, API access, integration with 3rd party services, and much more. We have only just begun!

As we’re making steady progress towards the launch we have no new features to announce… yet (sorry folks!), so we thought we’d give this post a more personal touch, to show you a little bit about us.

Whiteboard

Even in the immaterial world of software the whiteboard is great to brainstorm and argue about how to best improve and add new functionality to Thymer. Here we’re sketching an alternative interface for Thymer, so people can access Thymer on the road.

Desk

This is one of our improvised workplaces. A picture says it all; you can’t fake this kind of desk. One day we’ll get a real office.

Griotten

Griotten are a special kind of liquorice. They’re sweet (observe the sugar)! Dutch people can’t resist these things.

The Stunf Team

That’s us. Wim on the right, me on the left. The food is delicious.

What’s next?

We’re working on the final touches before the commercial launch! The saying about the last 10% is definitely true for us — we continually underestimate the work needed for the final touches. We want to make the upgrade process for our beta users as painless as possible; make sure everybody ends up with the best plan for them, whether that is the free plan or one with all the bells and whistles.

Some people use Thymer within teams and companies, some use Thymer to keep track of personal matters. Often however, people use Thymer for both. There are very busy users out there, being a part of multiple teams/companies. Some of you asked if it would be possible to join multiple teams, or not show the personal projects while at work. Another issue was that users that were already using Thymer wanted to start a team later on. Finally, users asked us for access restrictions to certain projects for certain users (e.g. when some external client is just involved in one project, or when not everyone is allowed to participate all projects).

We decided to rethink the way teams and personal accounts are set up, and are glad to announce it’s now possible to invite existing users to a team, be a member of multiple teams, and start a separate personal account all with one single Thymer login. We are also introducing Permissions, Sub-Teams within an existing Team and a new Settings panel today.

Multiple Thymer Accounts (with one login)

It’s now possible to have different accounts with just one login name. An account can be a personal account, a team account you created or a team you are member of. Those with multiple accounts can switch to another team easily: just click on the name of the current Team under the Thymer logo. An account menu will appear, so you can switch between accounts with just a single click.

There is also a new “All Accounts” view, which you can access by clicking ‘All accounts’ from the menu above. It’s meant to give you an overview of all your tasks in all your accounts. Although we think it’s likely you’ll usually only with one account at the same time (e.g. the work account when at work, personal account when at home), we feel that having one global overview is really effective (and good for peace of mind), and it’s one of the reasons Thymer is designed the way it is.

From this “All accounts” overview you can also an overview of all active projects in all accounts, and easily jump back and forth between projects:

Permissions

Another new feature is the ability to set Permissions for your team. Permissions can be viewed per project or per user. There are global permissions that specify the role of a member in your team (account owner, administrator, normal user), and what functionality is available to this user:

• Can create projects
• Can log time
• View activity feed
• View reports
• Create reports
• Is administrator

Next to these global permission settings, the following project level permissions are now available. Per project you can set whether a user can:

• View (only view tasks and comments, no edit or create)
• View & Comment (only view tasks, but allowed to leave comments)
• Full access (view, comment, create, edit and log time for tasks)
• No access (project, its tasks, its comments and activity is invisible to the user)

Projects can only be edited by the creator of the project and administrators. (Administrators can revoke their own access rights to projects but always restore them in the Settings screen). To set the permissions of a new project, or edit the permissions of an existing project, click the “Permissions >>” button in the Edit/Add Project dialog.

After clicking on the Permissions>> button:

When creating a new user, Thymer will now ask what initial permissions this user should have. This makes it possible to for example invite an external client that’s only allowed to view the tasks in one project in which he or she is involved. Private project remain the same: only the creator of the project can view its tasks (and no permissions can be set for a private project).

For the general permissions, and the permission overview per user, see the screenshots under Settings.

Sub-Teams

When your team is getting bigger, the user list gets longer and harder to navigate. With sub-teams we make it easier to access the team members you work with most. The administrator a team can go to Settings >> People & Permissions and set up sub-teams. All that’s needed is a new for the sub-team (e.g. Developers, or PR) and select which users should be part of this team. A user can be part of multiple sub-teams or none at all (there’s always an “All” sub-team containing all members). You can always remove and change sub-teams, so feel free to experiment. The sub team lists are used to simplify the task lists and changing permissions, as seen in the following screenshots:

Settings

As we’ve been adding more and more features, our original Settings screen wasn’t practical anymore. We’ve completely redesigned it, and added new option screens for Permissions, Sub-Teams, inviting new team members and adding new accounts.

We think all this will make it much easier to collaborate within and across teams. We hope you enjoy the new features!

Search

If you use tags in the search box you can search within specific projects, for tasks belonging to somebody in your team, or tasks with a specific tag.

The @all tag
If you add this tag to your search it will return all tasks, even if they’re deleted, belong to a different user in your team, and so on.

@deleted and @completed/@done
Add these tags if you want to search for previously deleted or completed tasks.

Flags
You can search for tasks with a specific flag with the ordinary tags: @deleted, @important, @billable and @waiting.

Search based on deadline
When you use the tag @today, you’ll search for all tasks that people in your team have planned to do today. Do you want to know if Bob is going to work on any important tasks today? Just type “@bob @important @today” and you’ll find out! Aside from @today, we also have the @thisweek tag, that will return all tasks scheduled for this week.

You can also search based on deadline, with the tags @due, @duetoday, @duetomorrow, and so on. With these tags you can quickly find upcoming deadlines. With month tags you’ll find tasks due in that month (@september to find all tasks due in September). And finally, you can use day tags. Use @wednesday to find which tasks are due this Wednesday.

Actually, there’s one last feature: @overdue. This will give you all tasks that have not met their deadline.

Mix and match!
All the tricks combined above can be combined to get exactly the search results you need. Want to find all tasks that are important, need to be discussed, and are due this week? Now you can: “@discuss @important @duethisweek”. Want to find all tasks with an @email tag, in the projects Marketing or Sales? Just as easy: “@email @marketing @sales”.

Saving search results

You can save your searches, so you can get back to them in a couple of clicks!

Show deleted or completed tasks

Click on options (next to the input bar) and you’ll find two new links “Show completed” and “Show deleted”. These links will show all the tasks you’ve previously completed/deleted for the selected user and project.

Undelete tasks

Re-open tasks

And a couple of smaller changes

- When you now view the task list of the entire team (by selecting “All” from the user list at the top right) the tasks are sorted by deadline first, and then grouped by the person responsible.

- You can now use accented letters (such as é and è) in your display name (nickname).

- We’ve added an option for recurring tasks. You can now select “weekday”, to get tasks to repeat every Monday through Friday, or you can use the @every-weekday tag when you create the task.

- You can use month tags, such as @september or @nov, to give set the deadline of that task to the last day of that month.

- More helpful date descriptions when you hover on deadlines. Example: “Thursday 2 weeks from now (9/3/2009)”

What’s Next

As mentioned in our last blog post, we’re also working on new team features; we’ll have an announcement about that soon. Hope you enjoy the new features!

Search

One of the new features is a powerful Search. You can use it to search through all tasks and comments in Thymer, so you’ll find everything back in an instant. The Search can also be used for specific queries and sorting. When we release the feature we’ll write about all the possibilities. For now, here’s a preview of searching for all tasks due today, ordered by responsible person:

Multi-Teams

Quite some users are working on multiple accounts. For example, you could do some consulting work for one company, work in another team and have a personal account. To make it easier to work with multiple teams, we’re going to allow Thymer users to be part of multiple teams, with a sample way to switch views. Currently, the name of the Team (or your personal account) you’re working with can be seen under the Thymer logo. In the following screenshot, it’s the team of ExampleCom Inc.

With the upcoming feature, you can be part of multiple teams; to switch to another team just hover over the Team name to access the team menu. Here you see all your memberships, and switching view is done with a single click.

It will also be possible to invite existing Thymer users to your teams.

More news soon!

Recurring Tasks

Quite some beta users have requested support for creating recurring tasks in Thymer. We’re glad to announce this feature is now available in Thymer.

Every recurring task in Thymer has a start date, and a recurrence pattern. The start date acts as the first due date. Then, when you complete the task, the next due date is set according to the recurrence pattern. When no start date is given, the first deadline is set to ‘Today’.

An example: ‘file taxes’ has to be done every 3 months, starting tomorrow.

In Thymer, this task is added by using the @every-tag: “file taxes @every3months @tomorrow”. If today is the 12th of july, the first deadline for ‘file taxes’ will be July 13th.

After completing the task, the next deadline will be set to October 13th.

A repeating task can be recognized by the arrow symbol next to the due date. Hover over the arrow to view the recurrence pattern.

We also modified the Edit pane to make it easy to edit the upcoming due date, the recurrence pattern or remove the recurrence altogether. Just open the Edit pane, and open the  dropdown menu.

For now, the following patterns are available:

• every weekday: @every-saturday (or, @everysat for short)
• every x-th day of the month: @every3rd, @every5th
• every x days: @every2days, @everyday
• every x weeks: @every3weeks, @everyweek
• every x months: @every12months, @everymonth

Together with the Reminder feature, we hope this feature will help you remember important repeating tasks.

New Project Edit

We’ve also made it easier to edit projects. Instead of finding the Edit button somewhere at the bottom of the task list, you can now click the Edit icon in the active project tab.

History in Log Time Dialog

If you’re tracking time and adding a new entry to the log, it’s useful to get an overview of the previous changes that were made to this task. The Log Time pane will now show a history overview for the task, showing a description of the entry, by whom the change was made and the amount of time logged.

New Date Tags

An additional date tag was added that can be used to quickly assign due dates. Instead of having to figure out the number of the month and typing @9/2/09, you can now also use @sept2nd, or @2ndsept. When using the numeric date tags (like 9/2/09), the year is now optional, so 9/2 works as well (or 2/9, depending on your date format setting — which you can change at any time on the Settings page).

Filter Reports by Tags

The Report function just became a bit more powerful by allowing you to filter on tags, so you can for example create reports of sub-projects.

What’s Next for Thymer?

As a big step for ourselves, we’ve set an internal deadline for the release of Thymer. We’re not ready to announce it yet, as it depends mainly on two big features we’re working on right now. We think these will be big and really make it easier for people to work with each other on different projects with many different tasks. Of course we’ll announce the new features on our blog, and maybe some preview screenshots within the next week. As we’re getting close to a release we’re also still working on figuring out the details on things like pricing, all of which we’ll announce here as soon as we know more. For now we hope you enjoy the new features, and thanks for your continuous flow of feedback!

Task Reminders

If you added tasks with due dates, you can now let Thymer remind you of upcoming deadlines with Reminder Notifications via email! Go to the Settings page and select how often and when you want to be reminded. The reminders will be sent at 4am, your time zone.

Better overview for busy teams

We’re getting more and more teams that have quite some members, working on a large number of projects. With so many projects and team members, the current view was not always practical. Maybe you only work most on a few projects, and you don’t need a list of all users at all times. We now added an option to only view a selected number of projects and users, and put the rest in a dropdown menu. They’ll be out of the way making your overview clearer again, but still accessible just with one extra click. It’s completely optional, so you can still display all users and all projects always, if you want.

To enable this feature, go to Settings, scroll down to Project & User List Preferences and select Collapse Users and/or Collapse Projects.

@Last

If you don’t specify a deadline or drag the input bar, your new task appears on the top of the list. If you want to your task to appear at the bottom of the list, use ‘@last’. Even if your task has a deadline, it will be moved down. This is great for tasks you plan to do ‘sometime’. Example: “learn Dutch @last”.

New Help

We also added a more step-by-step introduction tour, which serves as a new general help page. The Cheat Sheet is also still available, and we recommend watching the screencast to quickly get an idea of the idea and functionality behind Thymer (although the screencast still has to be updated to reflect the latest changes and additions).

What’s Next

Also in the pipeline are some other big features we want to add before the public release. One of them is multiple-team support, which we’ll have an update about soon. Now it’s time to send out some invites!

Enjoy the new features!

Hi everyone, time for some updates and announcements!

First of all, we’ve received a huge number of new beta requests the last 10 days. For all of you who are still waiting: we’re going to send out invites to everybody on the list after the weekend! It’s a big list so we’re looking forward to all the feedback, we hope you like it!

We’ve also been working on some more features. Some of them will be released monday in a few days, so you can expect another ‘New feature’ post then. These are the new features that are available right now:

Printing the Task List

It’s now possible to print your task list! Whenever you want to print your task list, bring up the options bar by clicking the ‘…‘ (next to the ‘Add’ button)

Then, click ‘Print’ in the options bar, and Thymer will generate a printable page for you!

Options Bar

As shown above, ‘Printing’ is available from the new Options bar. From the bar you can also edit the currently selected project, so you don’t have to scroll down anymore to reach the Edit button. Other advanced features that you won’t need all the time will also be added here in the future.

Smarter Editing — Quickly re-assign tasks to other projects or team members

Just typing in what you mean is a fast way to add new tasks to Thymer. When editing a task, however, we usually just want to change a specific detail. Some users told us that it should be easier to assign a task to another person or project. We now changed the edit pane, so that it allows you to quickly change specific details of the task. For example, to reassign a task to another project or team member, just select one from the respective dropdown menus. It’s also easier to edit the tags now. If you prefer editing tasks by using the original text input control instead, you can switch back by pressing the two little blue arrows.

Improved Scheduling

We’ve been changing the behavior of the task list with respect to deadlines a bit.

First of all, we improved the placement of a newly created task with a deadline. It should now always show up in the correct section (Today, Week or after Week), even if a task with a later deadline has been dragged to the top of the list.

In addition to this, a new change will make sure your schedule stays up to date! Every night when the date changes, Thymer now automatically moves tasks up to the ‘Today’ or ‘Week’ section. This way tasks that have a due day that used to be far into the future, will eventually be moved up and end up in the Today section, so your schedule is kept up to date and you won’t miss their deadlines!

One of the changes we’ll release on Monday will also make editing a deadline move the task to the correct section, which makes it easier to keep your schedule up to date if a deadline changes.

Other small changes

- Reports now include full comments
- Tags are shown in reports and the Feed

Hope you find the new features useful, and as always, thanks for all your feedback! We’re going to finish the other features now, and tell you about it soon :). Have a nice weekend everyone.

This is what we added the last week:

Keyboard Shortcuts

We added support for keyboard shortcuts! Use the arrow up and down keys to select a task. Then press ‘e’ for edit, ‘f’ to finish (complete) a task, ‘g’ to “go” and start the timer, and finally ‘d’ to discuss. To go back to the input bar, press Esc. It’s also possible to switch projects by simply pressing Ctrl-left and Ctrl-right.

Project Colors

You can now assign a color to your projects! This helps you to get an overview of what needs to be done across different projects in a glimpse.

Smarter URLs

When you bookmark a Thymer page it will remember your project and tag filters!

Improved Sign up Form

This one is for the new users ;). We made some improvements to the sign up form. It will try to detect your city and country, so you won’t need to hunt for the right timezone anymore.

More date tags

Support for more date tags: @3rd, @26th, etc. Example: ‘Review document @26th’

Larger Teams

We got feedback from some larger teams that their team member list didn’t fit on the screen. That should be fixed now.

First day of the week

You can now let the calendar week start on Monday or Saturday. See settings page.

Display Name

You can now change how your user name is displayed from the settings dialog.

Alternative email address

Go to the Settings page to specify an alternative email address. Handy for those with a different email address on their cell phone.

We hope you enjoy the new features, expect many more soon!

Enough daydreaming, back to the working part! We have big plans for Thymer in the future, but we started out building some of the most requested features. So, here they are:

Filter by tags

Tags already worked, but they were just visual helpers. It is now possible to filter your task list by tags. The tag list can be found under the project bar and shows which tags can be filtered on within the project (or, when no project is selected, shows all tags). You can add as many tags as you want to any task. When you filter a project on a tag, that tag is automatically added to any new task you create. This means you can use tags to further sub-divide your projects. Or, if you are a fan of the GTD (Getting Things Done) system, you can use them to describe things like contexts. Tag filtering for reports will be added soon.

Add tasks and notifications through email
Released two days ago, see the previous post.

Twitter Integration

It is now possible to add tasks through Twitter. We realize this might not be for everyone, but there are quite a few users who really like twitter and their mobile phone :). You can send the tasks from your mobile phone, the web or any other twitter client. This feature is disabled by default, and can be enabled under ‘Settings’.

To add a task through twitter:

- Tweet your task to @stunf (either public or DM).
- Important: Start your tweet with nt (which stands for ‘new task’)
- Since @ is reserved in twitter, you can use ‘*’ or ‘+’ instead in your task description.

Example — From the Web (Public):
@stunf nt some new task +today +john

Example — From your Phone (Direct Message, if we follow you)
d stunf nt some new task +today +john

If you tweet your tasks in public, everybody knows what you have to do, so hopefully peer pressure will cause you to stop procrastinating and complete your task :)!

Some small improvements:
- When you create a new project, existing tasks with that tag are automatically added to the project.
- Hyperlinks in tasks are now clickable.
- You can now have spaces in project names. Spaces will show as dashes in project tags.
- Want to change the order of your projects or team members? Now you can! Check out the settings page!

- If you create a task like this: “Buy groceries — Tomatoes / Sprouts / Cheddar”, the part after the – will automatically be added as a comment. (Especially handy if you send tasks via email)

What’s Next

Other features that were requested a lot include support for printing and project tag coloring. This will be added sometime soon.

Next  to these smaller improvements we are planning some other big features as we’re getting closer to the first full release of Thymer. One of this will be an API. Internally we are already working with Thymer linked to several other applications. We think this will be really useful and are looking forward to showing it when it’s done. There’s some more (including some new team features), but we’ll save that for later :)

New Invites

To everybody who’s currently on the waiting list: check your inbox, as we will start sending out new invites today.

As always, all feedback is welcome, and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can.
If you’re interested in the latest developments, make sure to subscribe to our blog or follow us on twitter (@stunf).

Enjoy the new features!

1. Add tasks via email

When you want to add a task on the go it’s easy to just send an email from your phone.

1. Go to settings, and check the box “Allow task creation via email”.
2. Send an email to addtask@thymer.com (or simply task@thymer.com). You have to use the email address you set in your profile (otherwise we don’t know to which account to add the new task)
3. A new task is created using the subject line from the email. That’s it.

You can still use tags. So if your subject line of the email is “@jeremy @server Upgrade web server @important @tomorrow” then Jeremy will know he has to upgrade the server, that it’s an urgent task, with a deadline tomorrow. Nifty!

2. Email notifications

But what if Jeremey doesn’t check Thymer every day? It would be even better if Thymer would also email Jeremy. So that’s what this feature is about: email notifications.

It’s really easy. You check the box “Email me at team activity” on the settings page and hit Apply. From then on you’ll be emailed by Thymer whenever a team member comments on a task, completes one or adds a new one.

That’s it. Thanks everybody for trying Thymer and all the detailed feedback!

Persistent Timer

To track time for a task in Thymer, simply click the green ‘play’ button in front of a task. If you have used this feature before, you know that a timer is started, which you can use – next to manually entering a duration – to track the amount of time you spent on the task. This timer is now made persistent, meaning that if you select another project, browse to another page, or even completely log off, the timer will keep ticking. When you come back to the list with the task, the timer will re-appear.

Besides the timer and manually entering the amount of time spent, an additional option ‘Since previous entry’ has been added. Selecting this option will add the time between now and your last time tracking log entry to the new entry. For example, if your last log entry was made at 12:00, and it’s 13:45 at the time you click ‘Add to log’ with the ‘Since previous entry’ option selected, Thymer will assign 1.75 hours to the log entry.

Real-Time Activity Feed

One of the things we use Thymer for is to see what other team members are working on. In order to improve on this a bit, we decided to turn the previously static ‘Default’ report page into a lively Real-Time Activity Feed. When you see new comments and changes flying by as they happen, it makes it even easier to directly respond to any comments, collaborate and keep track of the progress that’s being made. Plus, it’s really motivating to see other people working ;). If you don’t feel keeping the browser open for this is very practical, you can subscribe to the RSS Feed instead (see the RSS icon on the Reports page). Note: the RSS Feed is password protected; to view the Feed, you either have to be currently logged-in, or provide your Thymer username and password to your RSS client.

Editing and Removing Log Entries

All the items shown by the Feed can now be edited and/or deleted. Deleting a Change (Time Tracking entry) or Completion from the Feed will undo the action. Removing a ‘Completed’ will thus mark the task as re-opened. Removing a Log Entry will lower the logged time spent on the task. Deleting a comment or new entry will simply hide this entry from the feed.

Log Entries and Comments in the Feed can also be edited now. Comments can also be viewed directly from the Feed, making it easier to follow a discussion.

General Comments

We often found the need for adding general comments (such as, “Sorry, won’t be able to do much today, I’m will be on the beach.”; or something like that). This is now possible by adding a new comment directly into the feed on the Reports page.

Updated Reports

Where the Activity Feed only shows recent changes (last 14 days) and is updated with very detailed information about current progress, the ‘Create Report’ feature can be used to create a custom report of changes and spent time for a certain person, project or during a certain time period. The ‘Default Report’ has now been changed into a very dynamic Feed, and the Reports are now much more static. They can be accessed by their own permanent URL, do no longer show any controls and load faster. The simpler design makes it more suitable for printing. In general, we got some more feedback related to making Thymer more printer-friendly; this is something we will further improve upon soon.

Updated Splash page

We updated our splash page at Thymer to reflect the latest changes.

More invites

During the past few weeks, more people signed up for the private beta. We will be sending out more invites, today.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Thymer as we are getting ready for the public beta and release.