Stunf

[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!

First of all, just wanted to say last week has been such as rush! As most of you probably know by now, we got covered by Mashable (thanks for the great write up!). After that there were many many tweets, even more people signed up and we got a lot of emails and feedback. It’s an amazing feeling to get all this feedback, so a big thank you to everyone! It’s great to hear many of you liked Thymer, and we’re doing what we can to keep on improving it. It feels our little startup is really starting to take off!

Enough daydreaming, back to the working part! We have big plans for Thymer in the future, but we started out building some of the most requested features. So, here they are:

Filter by tags

Tags already worked, but they were just visual helpers. It is now possible to filter your task list by tags. The tag list can be found under the project bar and shows which tags can be filtered on within the project (or, when no project is selected, shows all tags). You can add as many tags as you want to any task. When you filter a project on a tag, that tag is automatically added to any new task you create. This means you can use tags to further sub-divide your projects. Or, if you are a fan of the GTD (Getting Things Done) system, you can use them to describe things like contexts. Tag filtering for reports will be added soon.

Add tasks and notifications through email
Released two days ago, see the previous post.

Twitter Integration

It is now possible to add tasks through Twitter. We realize this might not be for everyone, but there are quite a few users who really like twitter and their mobile phone :). You can send the tasks from your mobile phone, the web or any other twitter client. This feature is disabled by default, and can be enabled under ‘Settings’.

To add a task through twitter:

– Tweet your task to @stunf (either public or DM).
– Important: Start your tweet with nt (which stands for ‘new task’)
– Since @ is reserved in twitter, you can use ‘*’ or ‘+’ instead in your task description.

Example — From the Web (Public):
@stunf nt some new task +today +john

Example — From your Phone (Direct Message, if we follow you)
d stunf nt some new task +today +john

If you tweet your tasks in public, everybody knows what you have to do, so hopefully peer pressure will cause you to stop procrastinating and complete your task :)!

Some small improvements:
– When you create a new project, existing tasks with that tag are automatically added to the project.
– Hyperlinks in tasks are now clickable.
– You can now have spaces in project names. Spaces will show as dashes in project tags.
– Want to change the order of your projects or team members? Now you can! Check out the settings page!

– If you create a task like this: “Buy groceries — Tomatoes / Sprouts / Cheddar”, the part after the — will automatically be added as a comment. (Especially handy if you send tasks via email)

What’s Next

Other features that were requested a lot include support for printing and project tag coloring. This will be added sometime soon.

Next  to these smaller improvements we are planning some other big features as we’re getting closer to the first full release of Thymer. One of this will be an API. Internally we are already working with Thymer linked to several other applications. We think this will be really useful and are looking forward to showing it when it’s done. There’s some more (including some new team features), but we’ll save that for later :)

New Invites

To everybody who’s currently on the waiting list: check your inbox, as we will start sending out new invites today.

As always, all feedback is welcome, and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can.
If you’re interested in the latest developments, make sure to subscribe to our blog or follow us on twitter (@stunf).

Enjoy the new features!

After the sudden influx of users (we got over 1200 new users from Mashable alone) it was high time to write some more
features. So here goes:

1. Add tasks via email

When you want to add a task on the go it’s easy to just send an email from your phone.

1. Go to settings, and check the box “Allow task creation via email”.
2. Send an email to addtask@a.thymer.com (or simply task@a.thymer.com). You have to use the email address you set in your profile (otherwise we don’t know to which account to add the new task)
3. A new task is created using the subject line from the email. That’s it.

You can still use tags. So if your subject line of the email is “@jeremy @server Upgrade web server @important @tomorrow” then Jeremy will know he has to upgrade the server, that it’s an urgent task, with a deadline tomorrow. Nifty!

2. Email notifications

But what if Jeremey doesn’t check Thymer every day? It would be even better if Thymer would also email Jeremy. So that’s what this feature is about: email notifications.

It’s really easy. You check the box “Email me at team activity” on the settings page and hit Apply. From then on you’ll be emailed by Thymer whenever a team member comments on a task, completes one or adds a new one.

That’s it. Thanks everybody for trying Thymer and all the detailed feedback!

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.