Status & New Feature: File Attachments!

It has been a while since our last blog post in June (!). So what have we been up to since then? First of all, we have been making a lot of changes ‘behind the scenes’. We have upgraded our server architecture, so we hope Thymer feels even snappier. We have also added a lot of small improvements and fixes, such as:

– 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@a.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!

New reporting features

In order to track the time and costs of projects and people, Reports can be created from change log entries at the Reports page. In the Create Report dialog, a project, a member from your team, and some additional options can be selected. The report then shows the changes made by that person in that project, during the selected date range. To make it even easier to find out how much time was spent where and by whom, we now introduce an additional reporting feature: grouping by projects or persons.

grouping_small

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.

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

Extra notification, import and export options

Some more small feature news today. If you’ve been using the Settings page recently you might have noticed some additional options. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

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.

screenshot-notification-settings

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.

screenshot-import

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!

Short feature news: New add task menu

Another small new feature today, a new menu for adding tasks.

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.

addmenu

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, iCal support, Task Colors & Project Titles

Feature news! Today we’re releasing the following new features (available for all plans, paid and free):

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.

archives

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

archivedprojects

.. and select the project you wish to restore.

archive_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.

edit_color

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.

taskcolor_milestone

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.

project_hover

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 (Instructions), 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.

subscribe_ical

iphone_ical

iCal on the iPhone

ical_outlook

and in Outlook

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