Planning and calendar improvements

New: Start and end times for tasks

timespan

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

ical2
icaliphone2
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.

gcalsms

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!

Thymer for iPhone

3 minute screencast


A quick 3 minute introduction to Thymer for the iPhone!


Project list

Users and Projects
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

View task

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

Recent Activity
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.

Thymer is Beta no More!

It's the the twin STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft, in case you're wondering.

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

acne_login

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

branding

SSL

now_with_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.

prices

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!

Meet the team

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

iphone-sketch
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

Not actually an office.
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

we don't usually play with our food. really.
Griotten are a special kind of liquorice. They’re sweet (observe the sugar)! Dutch people can’t resist these things.

The Stunf Team

Diederik on the left, Wim on the right.

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.

Search!

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

searchresults1
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
searchmenu
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

undelete

Re-open tasks

reopen

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!