Category: New Features

The last couple of weeks we’ve been working on some major improvements. Features for working more easily with people across multiple companies and teams.

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:

Quickly switch between task list of different sub team members

An overview of permissions per sub team

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.

General Permissions

New Team Settings screen

View and change permissions per user

We think all this will make it much easier to collaborate within and across teams. We hope you enjoy the new features!

As you’ve probably come to expect from us by now, we’ve been working on adding more features again :). This time we added support for Recurring Tasks, updated the Log Time pane, added support for Creating reports by tags, added some more date tags and fixes some glitches. More about our next steps can be found at the end of the post.

Recurring Tasks

Quite some beta users have requested support for creating recurring tasks in Thymer. We’re glad to announce this feature is now available in Thymer.

Every recurring task in Thymer has a start date, and a recurrence pattern. The start date acts as the first due date. Then, when you complete the task, the next due date is set according to the recurrence pattern. When no start date is given, the first deadline is set to ‘Today’.

An example: ‘file taxes’ has to be done every 3 months, starting tomorrow.

In Thymer, this task is added by using the @every-tag: “file taxes @every3months @tomorrow”. If today is the 12th of july, the first deadline for ‘file taxes’ will be July 13th.

After completing the task, the next deadline will be set to October 13th.

A repeating task can be recognized by the arrow symbol next to the due date. Hover over the arrow to view the recurrence pattern.

We also modified the Edit pane to make it easy to edit the upcoming due date, the recurrence pattern or remove the recurrence altogether. Just open the Edit pane, and open the  dropdown menu.

For now, the following patterns are available:

• every weekday: @every-saturday (or, @everysat for short)
• every x-th day of the month: @every3rd, @every5th
• every x days: @every2days, @everyday
• every x weeks: @every3weeks, @everyweek
• every x months: @every12months, @everymonth

Together with the Reminder feature, we hope this feature will help you remember important repeating tasks.

New Project Edit

We’ve also made it easier to edit projects. Instead of finding the Edit button somewhere at the bottom of the task list, you can now click the Edit icon in the active project tab.

History in Log Time Dialog

If you’re tracking time and adding a new entry to the log, it’s useful to get an overview of the previous changes that were made to this task. The Log Time pane will now show a history overview for the task, showing a description of the entry, by whom the change was made and the amount of time logged.

New Date Tags

An additional date tag was added that can be used to quickly assign due dates. Instead of having to figure out the number of the month and typing @9/2/09, you can now also use @sept2nd, or @2ndsept. When using the numeric date tags (like 9/2/09), the year is now optional, so 9/2 works as well (or 2/9, depending on your date format setting — which you can change at any time on the Settings page).

Filter Reports by Tags

The Report function just became a bit more powerful by allowing you to filter on tags, so you can for example create reports of sub-projects.

What’s Next for Thymer?

As a big step for ourselves, we’ve set an internal deadline for the release of Thymer. We’re not ready to announce it yet, as it depends mainly on two big features we’re working on right now. We think these will be big and really make it easier for people to work with each other on different projects with many different tasks. Of course we’ll announce the new features on our blog, and maybe some preview screenshots within the next week. As we’re getting close to a release we’re also still working on figuring out the details on things like pricing, all of which we’ll announce here as soon as we know more. For now we hope you enjoy the new features, and thanks for your continuous flow of feedback!

Today we’re sending out a lot of new invites, so if you’re still waiting, check your inbox! At the same time, we’re releasing some new features today!

Task Reminders

If you added tasks with due dates, you can now let Thymer remind you of upcoming deadlines with Reminder Notifications via email! Go to the Settings page and select how often and when you want to be reminded. The reminders will be sent at 4am, your time zone.

Better overview for busy teams

We’re getting more and more teams that have quite some members, working on a large number of projects. With so many projects and team members, the current view was not always practical. Maybe you only work most on a few projects, and you don’t need a list of all users at all times. We now added an option to only view a selected number of projects and users, and put the rest in a dropdown menu. They’ll be out of the way making your overview clearer again, but still accessible just with one extra click. It’s completely optional, so you can still display all users and all projects always, if you want.

To enable this feature, go to Settings, scroll down to Project & User List Preferences and select Collapse Users and/or Collapse Projects.

@Last

If you don’t specify a deadline or drag the input bar, your new task appears on the top of the list. If you want to your task to appear at the bottom of the list, use ‘@last’. Even if your task has a deadline, it will be moved down. This is great for tasks you plan to do ‘sometime’. Example: “learn Dutch @last”.

New Help

We also added a more step-by-step introduction tour, which serves as a new general help page. The Cheat Sheet is also still available, and we recommend watching the screencast to quickly get an idea of the idea and functionality behind Thymer (although the screencast still has to be updated to reflect the latest changes and additions).

What’s Next

Also in the pipeline are some other big features we want to add before the public release. One of them is multiple-team support, which we’ll have an update about soon. Now it’s time to send out some invites!

Enjoy the new features!

[June 30th Small Update]: We’re still finishing a new feature, so the new blog post and invites will come soon!

Hi everyone, time for some updates and announcements!

First of all, we’ve received a huge number of new beta requests the last 10 days. For all of you who are still waiting: we’re going to send out invites to everybody on the list after the weekend! It’s a big list so we’re looking forward to all the feedback, we hope you like it!

We’ve also been working on some more features. Some of them will be released monday in a few days, so you can expect another ‘New feature’ post then. These are the new features that are available right now:

Printing the Task List

It’s now possible to print your task list! Whenever you want to print your task list, bring up the options bar by clicking the ‘…‘ (next to the ‘Add’ button)

Then, click ‘Print’ in the options bar, and Thymer will generate a printable page for you!

Options Bar

As shown above, ‘Printing’ is available from the new Options bar. From the bar you can also edit the currently selected project, so you don’t have to scroll down anymore to reach the Edit button. Other advanced features that you won’t need all the time will also be added here in the future.

Smarter Editing — Quickly re-assign tasks to other projects or team members

Just typing in what you mean is a fast way to add new tasks to Thymer. When editing a task, however, we usually just want to change a specific detail. Some users told us that it should be easier to assign a task to another person or project. We now changed the edit pane, so that it allows you to quickly change specific details of the task. For example, to reassign a task to another project or team member, just select one from the respective dropdown menus. It’s also easier to edit the tags now. If you prefer editing tasks by using the original text input control instead, you can switch back by pressing the two little blue arrows.

Improved Scheduling

We’ve been changing the behavior of the task list with respect to deadlines a bit.

First of all, we improved the placement of a newly created task with a deadline. It should now always show up in the correct section (Today, Week or after Week), even if a task with a later deadline has been dragged to the top of the list.

In addition to this, a new change will make sure your schedule stays up to date! Every night when the date changes, Thymer now automatically moves tasks up to the ‘Today’ or ‘Week’ section. This way tasks that have a due day that used to be far into the future, will eventually be moved up and end up in the Today section, so your schedule is kept up to date and you won’t miss their deadlines!

One of the changes we’ll release on Monday will also make editing a deadline move the task to the correct section, which makes it easier to keep your schedule up to date if a deadline changes.

Other small changes

– Reports now include full comments
– Tags are shown in reports and the Feed

Hope you find the new features useful, and as always, thanks for all your feedback! We’re going to finish the other features now, and tell you about it soon :). Have a nice weekend everyone.

The user count is still growing rapidly, and thanks to all the new feedback we’ve made some more fixes and introduced new features.We’ve also been mentioned on more and more blogs like the popular Dutch Lifehacking.nl blog, thanks for the great posts everybody! We’re working hard to keep up with the stream of mails, feedback and keep adding features to make Thymer even easier and more powerful for the release version.

This is what we added the last week:

Keyboard Shortcuts

We added support for keyboard shortcuts! Use the arrow up and down keys to select a task. Then press ‘e’ for edit, ‘f’ to finish (complete) a task, ‘g’ to “go” and start the timer, and finally ‘d’ to discuss. To go back to the input bar, press Esc. It’s also possible to switch projects by simply pressing Ctrl-left and Ctrl-right.

Project Colors

You can now assign a color to your projects! This helps you to get an overview of what needs to be done across different projects in a glimpse.

Smarter URLs

When you bookmark a Thymer page it will remember your project and tag filters!

Improved Sign up Form

This one is for the new users ;). We made some improvements to the sign up form. It will try to detect your city and country, so you won’t need to hunt for the right timezone anymore.

More date tags

Support for more date tags: @3rd, @26th, etc. Example: ‘Review document @26th’

Larger Teams

We got feedback from some larger teams that their team member list didn’t fit on the screen. That should be fixed now.

First day of the week

You can now let the calendar week start on Monday or Saturday. See settings page.

Display Name

You can now change how your user name is displayed from the settings dialog.

Alternative email address

Go to the Settings page to specify an alternative email address. Handy for those with a different email address on their cell phone.

We hope you enjoy the new features, expect many more soon!