New: Start and end times for tasks

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

Tag	Effect
@2pm-4pm	Creates a task that lasts from 2pm to 4pm, in your timezone.
@2pm	Creates a task that starts at 2pm. Will show up on your calendar as a one hour event.
@16:00-17:30	You can also use a 24h clock
@8-11am	Shorthand is allowed

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:

Tag	Effect
@notags	Find all tasks without tags
@noproject	Find all tasks that are not part of a project
@nodue	Tasks without a due date
@norepeat	Tasks that do not recur

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

3 minute screencast

A quick 3 minute introduction to Thymer for the iPhone!

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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.

What’s happening?

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.

We’ve been working on this for a while, but we’re glad to announce a new feature … Search! We hope this powerful search function will make you even more productive. Next to search we’ve added some other options such as showing completed tasks within the task list, more recurring task options and more. Here’s what you can do with 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.

РYou can now use accented letters (such as ̩ and ̬) 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!