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.

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.

Example of a report of time spent by Peter in May&June. Grouped by project.

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!

New: Start and end times for tasks

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

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.

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:

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

3 minute screencast

A quick 3 minute introduction to Thymer for the iPhone!

Project list

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

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

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.

Another small new feature today, a new menu for adding tasks.

One of Thymer’s main features is the ability to quickly add new data without having to go trough countless menus and confirmation buttons. That’s why tasks can be added by just typing in what comes up, like “do groceries @tomorrow @john”. All kinds of information can be entered this way: tags, projects, delegation, etc. If you don’t feel like typing or learning these shortcuts, that’s fine too. Although assigning tasks to projects and users without shortcuts was already possible, we’re now introducing a new task menu that brings all possible task options in one convenient option bar. This way you can set all the advanced options with just a few clicks.

You can find the menu by clicking Options -> Advanced Add. If you want to use this menu by default, go to Settings -> Lists & Menus and select “Show “Advanced Add” menu by default.”

The new project selection menu is now also available in the Edit menu.

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!

Hi everyone, time for some more feature news! Last week we reported about improved time tracking & hourly rates. With those features, it’s possible to create reports that include – not only the spent time – but also the price, depending on the hourly rates. As the reports can now also be used for billing purposes, we’re now announcing a new feature that makes it easier to extract this data and use it for invoicing.

Export of Reports to Excel

Reports can now be exported to Excel, using either the CSV (Comma Separated Values) or HTML format. For our European users that write numbers like “1.000,50″, rather than “1,000.50″, we added the option ;CSV, which stands for Semicolon Separated Values (as the comma is used to decimal values).

Although CSV is the more traditional way of importing data into Excel, the advantage of HTML is that all character sets are supported. This means you shouldn’t have any problems with non-English languages.

To export, simply create or open a Report, click ‘Export’ and select the format. To import the file in Excel (or any other spreadsheet program), just click Open and select the file.

Note: in Business Teams, only people with the ‘Billing’ permission are allowed to Export reports.

New Export menu

Excel HTML output. Simply Open in Excel to import.

Export of Reports to MoneyBird

This feature is mainly for our Dutch users, that are using MoneyBird. MoneyBird is a nice web application from another Dutch company, for easily organizing, managing and sending invoices. You can now directly convert your Thymer Report into a MoneyBird invoice, simply by clicking ‘Export’ and selecting the ‘MoneyBird’ option. You will be forwarded to MoneyBird where you can login and authorize Thymer to create a new invoice for you.

An invoice in MoneyBird, as exported by Thymer

Updated ‘More..’ Projects Dialog

We also refreshed the design of the More projects dialog. As before, Thymer displays as many projects on top as fit on your screen. All other projects go in the “More” dropdown. You can turn on or off the dropdown in Settings -> Lists & Menus. Here you can also change the order of your projects, so that the projects you access most are always shown on top. Depending on how many projects you have, and the resolution of your screen, the More projects dialog now shows your projects in one, two or three columns. We hope this gives a much better overview. It also completely colors the project titles. To make it easier to select a project from the dropdown menu, you can use the full width of a project row to click on it.

Just a few more projects. Shown in one column.

Some more projects, in two column mode. With three columns, you can easily choose between 50 or more projects.

New permissions

We received some feedback of users who wanted to use Thymer as a tool for issue management. Some users should be allowed to report new issues, but not change their status and edit them. We therefore added a new permission level to projects, between “View & Comment” and “Full Access” – “View, Comment & Add”.

We hope you like the new additions!

More feature news! Today we are releasing quite a few new features.

Hourly Rates
When tracking time, it’s now possible to use hourly rates for billable tasks. You can create as many different rates as needed. When opening the time track pane, a drop down appears with the various rates (if the task is billable). It’s also possible to assign a default rate to a certain project. This rate will then be selected by default. As one of our goals is to keep Thymer as simple as possible, using hourly rates is entirely optional. If, on the other hand, you work a lot with billable tasks, we also made things a bit easier: you can now make projects billable by default. Every new task added to this project is made billable by default.

You can set Billing options for a project by clicking ‘More options’

The rates only specify the amount per hour, not the currency. A default can be set per project, as well as globablly. You can add as many different kinds of currencies as needed. A currency is simply a label, so if for some reason you find it convenient to use kilometers or miles as a currency, go ahead.

Set currency, default rate, and project billable flag.

Specify as many rates as needed.

We also introduced a new permission: Billing. Only users with the Billing permission can add, edit and remove hourly rates. Users without the permission can only select which rate to use for their time tracking entries, and they won’t be able to see the actual rates, only the descriptions. (Billing permission is always enabled for users with a Small Team or Professional account).

New Billing settings tab, accessible by users with Billing permission.

Improved Time Tracking
Besides selecting an hourly rate for billable changes, we introduced some other improvements to the time tracking dialog. Next to using a timer, or manually typing in the number of spent hours, it’s now possible to enter the amount of hours by selecting a begin and end time. “Previous entry” selects the end time of the previous change entry. Also new is the ability to toggle the billable flag from inside the time tracking pane. Furthermore, the timer can now be paused! If you click the ‘pause’ button under the timer, the timer is paused and the dialog is hidden. When you click the “play” button for this task again, the timer resumes. The timer is also automatically paused if you click the “play” button for another task. This way, if you’re working on a task, but you’re interrupted by another task, you can simply switch back and forth. Another new option is to track time for past dates, by using the new calendar control in the time track pane.

Improved Time Tracking: Rates, Pause/Resume Timer, Toggle Billable flag, Begin/end time.

New Reports

The reports feature has been updated to use the new hourly rates. Reports now show prices for billable tasks and projects. This way you can keep track of project budgets, or use it to bill clients or as a template for invoices. Reports created by users without the billing permission do not include the price, only the rate descriptions.

A report of different projects with different rates and currencies is also possible.

Feed Preview

To make it easier to keep track of recent changes by other team members, we introduced a Feed summary on the Task List page.

Other fixes and changes

- If you use the Notification Email feature, you’ll notice that we changed the format of these emails a bit. It shows more useful information in the subject line and name now, and you can jump right into comments.

- It’s now possible to collapse and expand the date separators of other team members (this will not affect their preferences)

- Some users reported problems with the project tabs under Webkit browsers (Safari / Chrome) under Snow Leopard. It showed some weird black lines, and only in these browsers and only in Snow Leopard. This was a really strange bug (a problem with the PNG image format). Thanks everyone for the feedback.

- Date separators now show both the begin and the end date of the date section.

- If no end date is selected for a Report, “Today” is used as default.

Hope you enjoy the new features. We’ll be back soon with more feature news!

It’s been a few weeks since our last post, as we’ve mainly been making some changes under the hood. Amongst the many small fixes, one of the changes you might notice most is that we optimized the search function.  New tasks and changes are now searchable immediately.

Of course we’ve also been working on new features. Rather than looking back on last year, we’d like to give you a hint of some things to come in the first few months of 2010!

Improved Time Tracking & Billing

The time tracking control will make it even easier to keep track of your time: the timer can be paused, and resumed as you switch between tasks. We’re also adding support for (hourly) rates so you can use reports to keep track of your project budgets. We expect to launch this feature within the next few weeks.

iPhone version
We all want to access Thymer on the go, so an iPhone optimized version is in development.

Team improvements
Currently, two major improvements are planned. First of all, we’re going to add a way for people with professional accounts to work together. Secondly, we’re going to add an additional restricted user level. The users will have very limited rights and will not count as full team members (meaning they also won’t count for your team’s user limit). This account type can be used to invite clients to comment on and keep track of projects they are involved in.

API
We’re still working out the details but we’re quite excited about the possibilities of linking Thymer to other applications and vice versa.

.. and much more
We have many more plans and we’re really happy with the support so far. That’s why one of our activities this month was sending you a thank you!

Coffee, ink and cards

Pile 1 of many ;)
Happy holidays and a happy new year everybody!

]]> http://stunf.com/blog/approaching2010/feed/ 4 http://stunf.com/blog/new-feature-easier-planning-with-improved-date-separators/ http://stunf.com/blog/new-feature-easier-planning-with-improved-date-separators/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:51 +0000 wim http://stunf.com/blog/?p=687

We’re glad to announce a new feature today. A little while back we put up a poll to ask your opinion on what this feature should look like. The outcome was pretty clear, so we got to work. This feature will make it easier to create a more detailed schedule for your tasks, and allows you to focus on the most important parts on the list. It’s now available for all plans, free and paid.

Calendar meets task list
The poll question was about the order in which the date separators and tasks are shown. Should we first display the date separator, followed by the tasks planned for this day/period, or, should we leave the order untouched and first show the tasks and then the separator. It turned out the majority preferred the date to be displayed first, like a regular calendar.

More date separators (Weekdays, Within two weeks, Month and Someday)
Before there were two “date separators” – Today & This Week – that could be dragged up and down, thereby creating a schedule for your tasks. We are now adding the option to add more of these separators: one for every day of the week, within two weeks, within 30 days and “someday”. This will allow you to create a more detailed planning for the upcoming week. It also enables you to put tasks that require no immediate action further back, into the new Someday section. Which separators you want to show can be changed easily. If simply dividing your tasks between today, this week or someday is enough, and the rest just feels unnecessary to you, then you can leave your settings untouched. If you’d prefer to make a more detailed schedule, you can simply select the separators you want to add, using the new Add Date Separator menu.

Collapse and expand sections

Usually not all tasks require immediate action. Some might have a deadline, but not until a few weeks from now, so the tasks are not of immediate concern. You’ll probably also have a bunch of tasks that you want to do eventually, but you have no idea when. You can now place those tasks in the “someday” section and forget about them. In that case you may want to a weekly review of those tasks, and see which have become more important or urgent, and drag those up.

Most Thymer users add more tasks to Thymer than they complete (and we’re no exception), so every week the task list grows longer and longer. That’s why we’re now introducing an option to collapse and expand the different date sections on your task list, as marked by the date separators. If you click on the black triangle next to Today, Someday or any other separator, that section will be collapsed. Just toggle the triangle to show that part of your list again. As before, tasks with due dates are moved up to their corresponding date section every night, so even if you leave your Someday section collapsed, the tasks that are due soon will eventually float to the top of your list. Thymer will remember which parts of the list you’ve collapsed.

@someday
To quickly add a task to the bottom of the list, we already introduced the @last tag before (e.g “Some task @last”). We’re now introducing the @someday tag. It is similar to @last, but instead of adding the task to the bottom of the list, it will put the task at the top of your Someday section.

What’s next
As announced earlier, we’re currently finishing a first iPhone version of Thymer. We’re also working on many new other features, ranging from managing project time budgets to collaborating with clients, but more about that later. For now, hope you’ll enjoy the new features and have a nice weekend.