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.

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.

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!

Archive projects, iCal support, Task Colors & Project Titles

Feature news! Today we’re releasing the following new features (available for all plans, paid and free):

Archive Projects

If a project is finished,  on hold or rarely accessed, you can now archive the project and all its tasks. The most recent changes and reports will still be visible, but the project will no longer appear in your project list. As long as the project is archived, adding or editing tasks for this project is not possible. In case you have a limited projects plan: archived projects do not count against your total number of projects.

To restore the project, click + (Add Project) -> Show archived projects…

.. and select the project you wish to restore.

Task Colors

Like assigning colors to projects, it’s now also possible to assign colors to tasks. If you select a color for a task, the row in your task list will be highlighted with that color. This way you can mark special kinds of events and tasks.

Select a color from the Edit Dialog. To create a task with a color, use one of the following keywords: @colorgreen, @colorred, @colorblue, @colorcyan, @coloryellow.

Example of task with red highlighting

Project Titles

In Thymer, projects have a short name (’project tag’), and a longer (optional) description. The short name is used to keep the project list and task list shorter, and to quickly add new tasks to a project by typing in the project tag. As the description can provide some important details to a project, this description is now shown when you hover over the project in the project bar.

iCalendar support

Viewing your Thymer task list with dates in your favorite calendar application is now possible! If you use calendar software with support for the iCal format (such as Google Calendar, Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook), you can subscribe to an iCal feed of your Thymer task list. You can either subscribe to an iCal feed of a specific project, or to the tasks of all projects. Select the project you wish to get an iCal feed for, and click Options -> Subscribe to iCal.

If you use week day sections in Thymer, tasks in your calendar will be shown on the day they are scheduled in Thymer. For all other date sections, tasks are shown according to their deadline. Tasks that aren’t scheduled on a specific date yet, or have no deadline, are excluded from the iCal feed.

iCal on the iPhone

and in Outlook

That’s it for now. Hope you enjoy these new features! More news next week!

New feature design – your opinion needed!

Today we’re announcing improved date separators for Thymer. Every day when we work on Thymer we make dozens of small decisions about the interface. Where to place buttons, what colors to pick, and much more. Every once in a while we have to make bigger decisions about the interface, decisions that have no obvious “right” solution. So today we thought: why not ask our users what they think?

So that’s what this blog post is going to be about. First we explain what the new feature is about, and then we’d like to hear which of the alternatives you like best.

The Feature
To plan your tasks, two date separators are currently visible in your task list: “Today” and “Week”. Right now, all tasks placed above the today separator are today’s work, all tasks placed between the Today and Week separators are due this week, and all tasks below the week separator are tasks you want to do eventually.

We’re now going to add more separators: one for every day of the week, one for tasks within 14 days, within 30 days and “Someday” (something GTD’ers should be familiar with). You can turn these separators on and off at any time in a new “Edit Date Separators” pane. Also new is the ability to collapse or expand sections of your task list. For example, collapsing the Someday section keeps your list short and lets you focus on your next actions.

The Alternatives
So, what about the alternatives? Currently, the tasks planned for a certain date appear above the separator (e.g. all tasks planned for today appear above the “Today” pointer, all tasks planned for Tuesday above the Tuesday pointer, etc.). If a section is collapsed, the items above are hidden. The options:

Alternative 1



Tasks planned for a certain date are above the separator. “Someday” will always be at the bottom of the list. Clicking the up arrow collapses the tasks in the section right above the separator. This approach makes Thymer more like a timeline where the Today separator marks the end of the list of tasks you want to do today, and marks the start of the tasks you want to do the rest of the week.

Alternative 2



Tasks planned for a certain date are below the separator. “Today” will always be at the top of the list. An extra “Someday” separator will mark the end of the planning for this “Week”. Clicking the down arrow collapses the tasks below the separator. This approach makes Thymer more like a calendar, where you find the tasks you want to do today under Today, the tasks you want to do this week under the Week separator and so on.

So what do you think?

1. I strongly prefer tasks show above the separator (Alternative 1)
2. I slightly prefer tasks show above the separator (Alternative 1)
3. I strongly prefer tasks show below the separator (Alternative 2)
4. I slightly prefer tasks show below the separator (Alternative 2)
5. I don’t care

The easiest way to vote is to twitter us, email us or just leave a comment here: just send 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to @stunf, team@stunf.com or post it as a comment below. Thanks!

If you want to explain why you think one solution is superior, or if you have a completely different idea, let us know!

Available soon – Let us know which you like best!
This feature should make organizing your tasks even easier, and close the gap between a calendar and a task list even further. Let us know what you think, and we’ll launch this soon! (available for all plans, free & paid)

Thymer is Beta no More!

We’re launching!

Since we started our Private Beta back in early April this year Thymer has come a long way. We’ve added many features (Team Support, Permissions, Search, Email notifications, Twitter Integration and much more) and we’ve fixed countless of bugs. And now finally, we’re think we’re ready to remove the Beta label.

But first, some new features!

Branding

You can now change the appearance of Thymer to make it fit better in your organization. You can put your own logo in the top left corner, add text to the log in screen, and you even get to pick own subdomain. In this example, http://acnecorp.thymer.com

SSL

The more people rely on the Thymer, the more important a secure connection to our servers becomes. So from now on users can access Thymer securely via SSL.

New Website

What can I say? It really speaks for itself (if it doesn’t — we’re doing something wrong)! It has a feature tour, buzz page and a page where we explain all the different subscriptions.

Subscription Plans

Last but not least — you can now order (and pay for) Thymer! There are at the moment 4 different kinds of subscriptions. Professional, Small Team, Team, and Free. Of course, we also have a comparison page between of different subscriptions. See screen shot below.

What happens to us Beta users?

You’ll get an email today and a page will pop up the first time you log in. In short: you get an extra fully-featured 30 days to either pick a subscription or a Free Account. Sign ups within 7 days get an extra lifetime discount.

So what’s next?

To start with? An iPhone version, iCal and Google Calendar integration, API access, integration with 3rd party services, and much more. We have only just begun!

Announcing multiple Thymer Accounts, Permissions, Sub-Teams, and new Settings panel

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:

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.

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

Recurring Tasks, Updated Log Time, Create Reports by Tag

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!

Task Reminders and Improved Team & Project list.

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!

New Features: Printing, Improved Scheduling, Smarter Editing and more!

[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.

New features: Shortcuts, Project colors and more!

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!

New Features: Tags, Twitter/Email, Improvements (Plus: Past Days Summary)

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!