What is Papyrs?
Papyrs is a web application which anyone can use to build their own personalized intranet for their company or team. No technical knowledge is required: just use drag & drop. Nothing to host or to install. Super easy. You can create pages to share news, information, files, images, and more with your colleagues and clients. You can even add custom online forms, which you can use to collect data and process requests. Social features such as the activity stream help you to improve communication and work better together. With the powerful search bar you can find back all your information, discussions and documents instantly.

Since we started the beta in the summer of last year, we have added a lot of features and improvements (powerful instant search, activity stream, visual version history, updated design, Google Apps integration, just to name a few). As always we will continue to add more functionality, and we always appreciate your feedback! We really love working on this and we have big plans to take Papyrs further in the future!

Subscription Plans
With the end of the beta we’re also introducing the subscription plans today. We decided to keep it really simple: $5 (€4) per user per month, that’s it. No page, form, or file limit! People you invite via email to share a page, but are not in your team, do not count towards the number of users. For the very small teams or one man shops out there, we also have a Free plan for up to two users.
If you sign up within the next 7 days you’ll get a 10% life-time discount with the coupon LAUNCH10!

You can find updates information on Papyrs and the subscription plans at www.papyrs.com/signup/. The documentation and support pages are also updated.

What happens to us beta users?
You will receive an email today and a notice bar will be displayed in Papyrs. Your account will be converted to a free trial, so you will get an extra fully-featured 30 days to either pick a subscription or a Free account. As a thank you for all our beta users, if you subscribe within 7 days you get an extra beta discount on your Papyrs subscription – for life!

We hope you enjoy using Papyrs and we’ll keep you updated on this blog about the big plans we have in store for Papyrs in the future!

Today we added a feature to Papyrs that makes it really easy to see how a page has changed over time. It will show you a visual comparison that highlights exactly what has changed.

See at a glance which text has changed (click for a larger screenshot)

Deleted text is in red, newly added text in green. Changes to image galleries, forms, and other widgets are also highlighted for easy comparison.

Select which two versions you wish to compare

Compare pages with a click of a button. That’s it. Have a nice weekend everybody!

Search

With Papyrs it is now possible to search within all your pages, comments, contacts and profiles, attachments, and submitted forms. Just start typing in the search bar and Papyrs returns the results nearly instantaneously. It has find-as-you-type. Never again waste more than a few seconds to find back that document, that attachment to a certain form, or a discussion with your co-worker. Of course Papyrs will only show items in the search results for which you have the necessary permissions.

Search your entrie Papyrs intranet in milliseconds: Papyrs finds your pages, comments, contacts, files, and submitted forms (click for larger screenshot)

Searches within attachments

Papyrs will also searche within attachments. You can find text contained in PDF files, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Do you want us to search within other types of documents as well? Just drop us a line at team@stunf.com and let us know.

Advanced Search

There are also a number of advanced search options:

Prettier URLs

In the previous version of Papyrs links looked pretty complex. A typical page would have a link that looked like https://yoursite.papyrs.com/page/5441/This-is-title-of-the-page. Hard to remember and hard to type! Also, if you shared the page with others by email or if you made the page open to the public the link would change. It would start with https://yoursite-public instead). That just wasn’t very convenient, so we’ve changed it. Links to your papyrs pages now look like this: https://yoursite.papyrs.com/Your-Page. Simple and easy to type! If the page is shared or public, people you share the page with can access the page with the same link.

When you go to the document’s settings page you can change the location (URL):

Change the location of the page

Smaller changes

1. You can now share profile pages by email address and make profile pages public.

2. You can now link to conversations on pages and on the Activity Feed. Easy if you want to send a link to a conversation via Instant Message or by email.

Link to conversations on the Activity Feed

That’s it

We’re really thrilled to start the year with these new additions, and we think the Search is going to save everybody a lot of time! More new features coming soon!

Over the past few months we have been adding many new features to Papyrs. This week we launched a design update and the Activity Stream.

With a lot of different information going back and forth between team members, the Activity Stream is a great way to stay up to date with everything that’s happening in your team.  You can find all the latest actions, post or view comments and status updates for everyone in your team or in a specific subgroup.

Streams have been an important part of many modern social networks, and are also becoming an important way to communicate within businesses and organizations. It’s an easy way to get your announcements or questions & answers out to entire teams, without spamming and cluttering their Inbox. This also makes it easier for other people to reply on activity items, participate in discussions and keep people up to date about their progress. Because inactive discussions automatically ‘sink’  to the bottom of the stream, the stream is good central place for both having active discussions as well as posting about updates (like micro blogging social networks).

Example of the Activity Stream (click for larger screenshot)

Because the Activity Stream is fully integrated with the other functionality in Papyrs, any updates to pages and forms are automatically posted to the stream, and visible only to people with permission to view this type of activity. For example, when Mary submits an Expense Reimbursement form and Mark from Accounting denies the request, it will be visible for her in the Activity Stream and she can directly access the form to add that missing receipt.

The Stream also supports sharing with and subscribing to items only within certain sub groups. It’s also possible to add a summary of recent activity to your pages using the Navigation widget, e.g. on your homepage. Finally, discussions on pages now also support replies on comments (threading), and new posts appear in the Stream as well.

UI Design Updates

Screenshot showing the new design – Editing a page

We also made some updates to the UI design of Papyrs, and added new buttons to the top of the page to quickly switch between the main parts of Papyrs (home page, page navigation, activity stream, people directory and settings).

We hope you like the new look and features!

With Papyrs you can easily build an intranet for your team using drag & drop, and use it to collaborate better with colleagues and clients. Easily create pages with rich notes, documents, images and much more to share all your information. Add custom online forms to collect data and process requests. It’s all very easy to use, so there’s no technical knowledge required!

Papyrs integrates seamlessly with Google Apps. After adding Papyrs you can:

When we designed Thymer, we made sure adding new items to your list is fast and easy. This also makes it easy to dump your thoughts onto your task list. Some of those are not actionable tasks yet. For example, you might have added some items you need more information about, forwarded some emails into your Thymer account, or entered items you don’t know yet when to do (if at all).

If you are used to getting things out of your head this way, you might have run into the problem where your Today section becomes cluttered with thoughts or non-actionable items. For our users who prefer to collect their stuff before organizing it further, we have added the Inbox feature to Thymer.

The Inbox works like any other separator (like Today or Week), which divide your task list into different sections. Once enabled, all items you add, through the Add bar or by email, are automatically added to the Inbox. Items with a deadline, however, are still automatically added to the corresponding date section of your task list. Like any other separator you can also collapse the Inbox section. This way, you can add as many thoughts and unorganized items without cluttering your schedule of actionable tasks.

Once you have collected “stuff” in the Inbox, you can process the items further. Either:

• Do – GTD suggests to do tasks that take less than two minutes immediately
• Defer – Drag your item somewhere on your schedule (e.g. Today, Monday, or Someday)
• Delete – The easiest way to get  rid of a task!
• Delegate – Click the edit icon and re-assign the task to a team member

You can add the Inbox separator by clicking on the + icon on a separator, select the Inbox option in the menu, and click Apply (see the screenshots below).

We hope you find it useful!

The problem

Collecting, sharing and finding back all your information is painful. Even with our little startup we already bumped into this problem. First we only had some notes with ideas (e.g. for new features), screenshots, drafts, discussions and design documents. Then, feedback from users, press clippings, etc. As we got more users we got more business data: instructions, receipts, invoices, that sort of thing. The more data we needed to share and keep track of, the more time it took to file them and find them back.

We figure every company must run into this problem, so we decided to check out the software packages out there.

Enter Wikis & Intranets

We tried some wiki-like software. Wikis can be light-weight but they don’t really fit our style of working. We don’t want to use those weird markup languages just to write a document. It’s too difficult to add a bunch of files or an image gallery. You spend too much time messing around with the Wiki itself and it’s all a huge distraction.

We tried some other apps that promise to address these problems but they turn out to be too limited in functionality or every task takes a dozen clicks.

Finally we tried some bigger intranet software. They offer all of the features we need (and then some), but unfortunately “enterprise” software takes ages to install and it costs and arm and a leg. Besides, because those enterprise solutions try to do everything they don’t do anything well. The user experience is lousy, and sometimes even requires programming to get something done! For software you need to use on a daily basis we want something that makes us happy using it.

Not only did we need a solution for ourselves, but we knew from experience other businesses and teams also waste time (and money) by inefficiently managing their information and documents. Not just documents but they also manually collect data in Excel (for example time sheets, customer surveys, expense reimbursements and leave of absence requests). Works fine for the first week, but as time passes those Excel files become more and more cluttered and unusable.

We couldn’t find any solution that would solve all these problems in a friendly manner and without requiring technical knowledge. This seemed like a perfect opportunity for us to build an app that would solve these problems for good!

Making Intranets cool again

When we see the word “intranet” big companies come to mind, armed with an army of consultants hired to install and customize the intranet. But after we put further thought into it we realized that an intranet is exactly what we were looking for after all: we want to build up a knowledge base, share documents, files, add forms, discuss ideas and collaborate with team members and clients. We just want it to be user friendly. No markup languages, no programming. Just drag & drop. That’s why we developed Papyrs.

We have been using Papyrs internally for the last couple of months and it has completely transformed the way we work. We get email updates whenever pages are updated, we can now find the information we’re looking for in seconds instead of minutes, we no longer have to email Word documents back and forth or copy/paste data in Excel, and we can access everything from anywhere. Our hope is that it’s going to have a similar positive effect on the companies of our customers. It’s going to be exciting!

For the last months we’ve been working very hard on the development of a new product and we’re happy to finally announce it today! Of course we’re working on the finishing touches, but we’re almost ready for the private beta. So what we’re showing today is a first glimpse of the new product. So, here goes:

An intranet to keep your business information organized.

At www.papyrs.com you can read all about Papyrs and sign up to receive a beta invite once we launch. We’re really curious about your feedback! (be honest :). If you have any questions or comments, feel free to shout out your thoughts on Twitter (@stunf) or in the comments below. We hope you find Papyrs interesting, and we look forward to the beta! We’ll keep you updated on any Papyrs news on this blog and via twitter.

- 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!