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Updates: Real-Time Feed, Fixes and More Invites

As you had to wait quite some weeks for a new post, we feel it’s time to announce some new features! We also made some additional improvements based on the feedback from our first private beta users. Again, thanks for the feedback everybody! So, let’s have a look at what’s new:

Persistent Timer

To track time for a task in Thymer, simply click the green ‘play’ button in front of a task. If you have used this feature before, you know that a timer is started, which you can use – next to manually entering a duration – to track the amount of time you spent on the task. This timer is now made persistent, meaning that if you select another project, browse to another page, or even completely log off, the timer will keep ticking. When you come back to the list with the task, the timer will re-appear.

Besides the timer and manually entering the amount of time spent, an additional option ‘Since previous entry’ has been added. Selecting this option will add the time between now and your last time tracking log entry to the new entry. For example, if your last log entry was made at 12:00, and it’s 13:45 at the time you click ‘Add to log’ with the ‘Since previous entry’ option selected, Thymer will assign 1.75 hours to the log entry.

Real-Time Activity Feed

One of the things we use Thymer for is to see what other team members are working on. In order to improve on this a bit, we decided to turn the previously static ‘Default’ report page into a lively Real-Time Activity Feed. When you see new comments and changes flying by as they happen, it makes it even easier to directly respond to any comments, collaborate and keep track of the progress that’s being made. Plus, it’s really motivating to see other people working ;). If you don’t feel keeping the browser open for this is very practical, you can subscribe to the RSS Feed instead (see the RSS icon on the Reports page). Note: the RSS Feed is password protected; to view the Feed, you either have to be currently logged-in, or provide your Thymer username and password to your RSS client.

Editing and Removing Log Entries

All the items shown by the Feed can now be edited and/or deleted. Deleting a Change (Time Tracking entry) or Completion from the Feed will undo the action. Removing a ‘Completed’ will thus mark the task as re-opened. Removing a Log Entry will lower the logged time spent on the task. Deleting a comment or new entry will simply hide this entry from the feed.

Log Entries and Comments in the Feed can also be edited now. Comments can also be viewed directly from the Feed, making it easier to follow a discussion.

General Comments

We often found the need for adding general comments (such as, “Sorry, won’t be able to do much today, I’m will be on the beach.”; or something like that). This is now possible by adding a new comment directly into the feed on the Reports page.

Updated Reports

Where the Activity Feed only shows recent changes (last 14 days) and is updated with very detailed information about current progress, the ‘Create Report’ feature can be used to create a custom report of changes and spent time for a certain person, project or during a certain time period. The ‘Default Report’ has now been changed into a very dynamic Feed, and the Reports are now much more static. They can be accessed by their own permanent URL, do no longer show any controls and load faster. The simpler design makes it more suitable for printing. In general, we got some more feedback related to making Thymer more printer-friendly; this is something we will further improve upon soon.

Updated Splash page

We updated our splash page at Thymer to reflect the latest changes.

More invites

During the past few weeks, more people signed up for the private beta. We will be sending out more invites, today.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Thymer as we are getting ready for the public beta and release.

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Private Beta

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In the past few weeks we’ve ironed out all the major issues in Thymer, and we’ve made a bunch of improvements based on the feedback we’ve received from the first private beta users.

Having ran all out of excuses we’re sending out invites to Thymer to all those who signed up on the splash page. Check your inbox — an invite might be waiting there for you already! We also noticed that a lot of people wanted to show Thymer to friends and colleagues, so this beta round we’re adding 3 extra Beta Keys to every invitation email, so you can give them away to others who want to give Thymer a try.

Haven’t signed up for the Beta yet? No problem — if you sign up today (but only today) we’ll send you an invite right away!

So what’s next?

We have a lot of ideas on how Thymer can still be improved, so new features are always on the way. We make new features available as soon as they’re finished, so you can expect several new features every week. If you subscribe to the blog you can follow the evolution of Thymer first hand — you’ll be the first to read about the changes and additions we make and why we designed them that way.

We’re also working on a subscription model for Thymer. We’ll be blogging about pricing for small teams and business accounts soon. Don’t worry, there will always be a free version too!

Enjoy your Beta account, and if you have any questions or comments, you know where to find us.

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Weeks 2 & 3: More features and improvements

The last two weeks we have been busy improving and adding some additional features to Thymer, based on the initial feedback (thanks everyone!). Here’s an overview of the changes you’ll notice most:

Date formats (German, Swedish)

Date Formats

Some German and Swedish users pointed out they would like to see support for date formats used in these countries. As we want Thymer to work for people in many different countries, we started out by added some additional date formats. More to come.

Inline Discussions

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It’s now possible to leave comments and discuss tasks without having to leave the page. An option to view the discussion on a separate page is also still there. As we also happen to often close a task after leaving a comment (like “I don’t think it needs to be improved any further”), we added an extra completed button which will post the comment and mark the task as done.  Comments can also be edited now.

Double Click to Edit

Some of our users told us it would be useful to be able to edit a task by simply double clicking it. We added this feature too.

Fixes and other improvements

  • We changed the way task lists are rendered now, so it should feel faster and snappier.
  • Just after the first users signed up, Internet Explorer 8 was released, and apparently there were still some issues for IE8 users; those have been fixed as well.
  • Times are now shown in a more readable format (like 15 minutes ago).
  • When many active projects are created, they will all be visible, spanning multiple lines.
  • Project names can now be edited, using the ‘Edit’ button shown at the bottom of a project’s task list.

For all those who signed up for a beta invite, watch your mailbox the next few days.

Have a nice weekend!

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Week 1

It’s been a wild ride the last week. The reactions we got on Thymer have been absolutely great! We’re glad so many of you like it. Many of you came up with feature requests and suggestions on how to improve Thymer. We can’t fix or improve everything at once and obviously not every request can be built into Thymer. Some suggestions contradict each other while others are not a priority yet and maybe interesting for later versions. We will, however, consider all your suggestions, so let us know what you think – and we’ll see what we can do.

Our main focus will always be to remove any bugs, keep the User Interface clean, intuitive and overall responsive. As long as you and we are satisfied on these points, you can be sure many more feature ideas will be added.

Based on all your initial feedback so far, we’ve already resolved some of the most reported issues: editing tasks caused recurring user name tags; projects, dates and user names are now case insensitive on input, but your casing will be preserved; some issues with using unicode have been resolved. More improvements (fixes and features) are on the way, stay tuned.

We are also happy to announce that we will very soon send out many more invites, and we’ll have some more news next week.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

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What are those flags ‘D’, ‘!’, ‘$’ and ‘w’ for?

We’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback in the last couple of days. Lots of questions, bug reports and feature requests. Thanks everybody! In the next couple of days we’re going to highlight a few features of Thymer that have raised some questions.

Today’s topic is about the buttons to the very right of every task that look like this Discuss Flag, Priority Flag, Billable Flag, and Waiting For Flag. This post explains what the buttons do and what they’re good for.

The first thing I should mention is that the flags don’t actually do anything. If you click on a flag it lights up, and it stays lit until you click it again. That’s pretty much it. We think this is a really simple way to quickly add some more details to tasks, without having to click around a lot or fill in additional forms.

The flag discuss Discuss Flag

The discuss flag can be used to indicate to other people in your team that the task should be discussed first. Suppose you see in the task list that Bob is going to design a web page, but you remember that you’ve built something similar a few months back, and you think some of the work can be reused. So you can add a comment to the task with a link to the previous work, and flag the Discuss Flag so Bob knows that there’s something to discuss. Bob can then decide whether to look into it, to ignore it, or to discuss it with you. The point is that by simply clicking on Discuss Flag the person responsible for the task knows there’s something to discuss and can react accordingly.

The flag important Important Flag

The important flag should be pretty self-explanatory. If something is important you don’t want to forget it, and a red box draws your attention to it. Especially if you make the schedule for your week every Sunday night (or Monday morning[1]) you won’t miss anything with a big Important Flag next to it.

The flag billable Billable Flag

The billable flag is to make it easy for people to keep track of their billable hours. You can create reports that only contain billable tasks, so you can be sure your grocery list won’t show up on the bill to your client.

The flag waiting for Waiting For Flag

The waiting-for flag is probably the most important flag: it tells you that you’re waiting for somebody else to take action. Because it’s really easy to lose track of what other people have (or should have) done the visual reminder is really helpful.

Perhaps you’re expecting a letter, an email or a phone call, or waiting for somebody else to finish another task. If you take a minute every week to make a schedule you’ll immediately notice when something is amiss. (The supplies still haven’t arrived? Better pick up the phone before we’re all out!)

Up next

In the next few days we’re going to highlight some more features of Thymer, talk about a few new features and more. So watch this space.

  1. Later, in another post…. how we use Thymer for the weekly review.