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!

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.

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!

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.

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 (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.

iCal on the iPhone

and in Outlook

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

Today we’re announcing improved date separators for Thymer. Every day when we work on Thymer we make dozens of small decisions about the interface. Where to place buttons, what colors to pick, and much more. Every once in a while we have to make bigger decisions about the interface, decisions that have no obvious “right” solution. So today we thought: why not ask our users what they think?

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.

Task list with an additional Someday separator.

The same task list, with the Someday section collapsed.

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)

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!