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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!