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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!

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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.

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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!

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Planning and calendar improvements

New: Start and end times for tasks

timespan

To give tasks a start and end time you can use tags like these:

Tag Effect
@2pm-4pm Creates a task that lasts from 2pm to 4pm, in your timezone.
@2pm Creates a task that starts at 2pm. Will show up on your calendar as a one hour event.
@16:00-17:30 You can also use a 24h clock
@8-11am Shorthand is allowed

If you want to specify the start and end time for a task you also have to give the task a due date. So “Attend sales seminar @4-6pm” will not work (4pm on what day?) but “Attend sales seminar @tomorrow @4-6pm” will work.

Calendar improvements

– The start and end times also show up on your calendar.
– You can now use “only show tasks with a deadline” to keep the clutter from your calendar

ical2
icaliphone2
Now you can see when events start on your iPhone, and you can get alerts as well

Tip: Free SMS/text notifications

If you synchronize your Thymer appointments with Google Calendar you can get text notifications for free.

gcalsms

Google Calendar

SMS notifications have saved us on more than one occasion, and you can’t beat the price! Thanks Google!

Minor search improvements

A few of our users requested a few more special tags to make it easier to find their tasks, so now you can also use the following tags:

Tag Effect
@notags Find all tasks without tags
@noproject Find all tasks that are not part of a project
@nodue Tasks without a due date
@norepeat Tasks that do not recur

That’s it for today. More news coming soon!

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Thymer for iPhone

3 minute screencast


A quick 3 minute introduction to Thymer for the iPhone!

Project list

Users and Projects
After you log in you get to the project tab. Here you can switch between accounts, select whose task list you want to view and navigate to the recent activity feed. At the very bottom you’ll find a search box, which works just like search in the regular version of Thymer.

Task Details

View task

When you select a task you go to the task details tab. Here you can assign the task to somebody else, mark it complete, toggle flags (discuss/billable/important/waiting for) and add tags. Tags you’ve used before are recommended automatically to save you some typing. Add or remove tags with just a tap of your finger. At the bottom of the page you can discuss the task with your team members or add some notes for yourself.

Recent Activity Feed

Recent Activity
Want to keep track of your team on the road? That’s where the Recent Activity Feed comes in. Here you can follow discussions, see which tasks have been completed and so on.

Offline Use (experimental)

When you’re not connected to the internet (or if you’re using an iPod touch) the web app will automatically start in offline mode. In Offline Mode you can access your tasks and projects (providing you’ve accessed them before) and check the recent activity feed. However, you cannot make changes to tasks, nor can you search for them.

How to get it

Go to http://m.thymer.com with your mobile browser and log in. Check the box “iPhone version” or “Android version” on the login page. For the best experience with the iPhone, add the app to your home screen after you’ve logged in. You can do this by clicking on the + icon on the bottom of the mobile Safari window. Then select “Add to Home Screen” to turn Thymer into a one-click app with support for offline use.