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)

Launch – The Week After

Hi there! Now the first storm of feedback has settled, we found some time to reflect and write up a “The Week After” story. But why make this public? Well, we’ve always been inspired and learned a lot reading about how fellow startuppers launched their companies, like Peldi from Balsamiq, who has been very transparent and covered every step of launching a cool app called Mockups. In that spirit we’d thought we share with you what our process has been so far.

In short: it’s been really busy and great! The launch went better than we expected, 7 minutes after going live we got our first customer! As with our beta launch we got a lot of nice reactions, thanks everyone! We got over 60 subscriptions in the first week (but more users, as some customers are a team), including families, hobbyists, independent contractors, companies, and other organizations such as charities.

So, let’s get to the numbers:

We had sales every single day, and that was a big relief. We knew big fluctuations between day to day sales numbers are to be expected, but we didn’t expect the first and last two days of the first week to bring in 80% of all sales.

We’re really happy about this!

Road to the launch
To give some more insight into how we went from idea to launch, this is roughly what we’ve been through in the past year and a half.

Idea (Summer 2008)
Before Thymer we’ve been working on other projects, and it’s always been challenging to keep a good overview of our responsibilities and keep track of what’s going on, especially as we were usually working from different cities and countries. Of course we tried every product for task and project management we could find, but none of them felt right for us. So we developed our own ideas about what we really wanted the software to do and asked ourselves if maybe this would be a nice product for other people to use as well. We didn’t want to become too distracted though (eventually the other project didn’t really work out, but that’s a different story), but our hands were itching and it became a little side-project… So, during the summer we made a lot of sketches about what the system might look like. We still weren’t too convinced it was worth turning this into a product. Inspired by the Four Hour Work Week-approach (the first sketches and brainstorming happened somewhere on the beach), we decided we would only create a very limited prototype, launch a demo video, and see what happens.

Demo video / Splash page (October 2nd, 2008)
The prototype was ready (ready enough to make a video about it, not to use it :) and we made a demo video. We put up a splash page with a description about Thymer, the screencast and an input box for collecting email addresses for interested people. We were very happy about receiving the first 50 email addresses of interested people almost right away. We got some very nice feedback from the start, which encouraged us to develop it further. For months we spent days and nights working very hard to go from a prototype to a beta product we hoped people would love to use. At this point we thought we would be only a couple of months away from a commercial launch.

Sneak Preview (very limited beta) (March 2009)
In March our beta list (people who signed up for the beta) grew to thousands of addresses, and we decided to send out a first small batch, to see what the initial reactions would be and to see if any weird problems would arise (nope, none did). Again, lots of positive feedback and lots of suggestions for improvement. We decided to polish Thymer a bit more, before we would invite everybody on the list into our private beta. You only have one opportunity to make a first impression after all. Launch not too early, launch often; so to speak.

Private Beta (May 2009)
We launched our private beta and sent out emails to some blogs if they were interested in giving Thymer a try; we also included beta keys for their readers. We got quite some press and thousands of visitors, who all wanted to try the beta! We also got mentioned in a paper magazine (.net developers). For some reason seeing Thymer mentioned on a big blog and in a paper magazine made it feel so surreal.

Preparing for launch (Jul – Oct 2009)
With many beta users using Thymer, we got quite some feedback, thanks again everyone! More and more people found their way to our beta list, as we were mentioned more on other blogs and twitter. Now the crucial question: would enough people love Thymer enough to actually pay for it? So far the feedback was great, but of course we need paying customers to survive. During the months leading up to the launch we worked on adding many features (features we were missing ourselves and features that were requested often). Next to all the coding, we worked out pricing plans and our subscription backend. A phase with more questions than answers: “Is the price right?”, “Is it easy enough to change from a beta to a free or paid plan?”. We kept testing and refining, and finally decided it was really time to find out: launch! And that brings us to where we are right now.

Our goals
We’re ecstatic about our start, and the feedback and sales are really encouraging! In the next few months we hope to become ramen profitable (meaning we make just enough to cover basic living expenses and operating costs for Thymer). This would open up all kinds of new possibilities, like, maybe, an upgrade for our company transportation:

Taken last year in front of my apartment. Winter is around the corner, so we better hurry :)

What’s Next
So what are we working on now? This week we’re launching a major new feature, making it easier to plan and manage longer task lists. And, we have some more news about the iPhone version. Other features are also in the pipeline, more about that soon!

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!

Meet the team

What’s happening?

As we’re making steady progress towards the launch we have no new features to announce… yet (sorry folks!), so we thought we’d give this post a more personal touch, to show you a little bit about us.

Whiteboard

Even in the immaterial world of software the whiteboard is great to brainstorm and argue about how to best improve and add new functionality to Thymer. Here we’re sketching an alternative interface for Thymer, so people can access Thymer on the road.

Desk

This is one of our improvised workplaces. A picture says it all; you can’t fake this kind of desk. One day we’ll get a real office.

Griotten

Griotten are a special kind of liquorice. They’re sweet (observe the sugar)! Dutch people can’t resist these things.

The Stunf Team

That’s us. Wim on the right, me on the left. The food is delicious.

What’s next?

We’re working on the final touches before the commercial launch! The saying about the last 10% is definitely true for us — we continually underestimate the work needed for the final touches. We want to make the upgrade process for our beta users as painless as possible; make sure everybody ends up with the best plan for them, whether that is the free plan or one with all the bells and whistles.

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!

Search!

We’ve been working on this for a while, but we’re glad to announce a new feature … Search! We hope this powerful search function will make you even more productive. Next to search we’ve added some other options such as showing completed tasks within the task list, more recurring task options and more. Here’s what you can do with the new features:

Search

If you use tags in the search box you can search within specific projects, for tasks belonging to somebody in your team, or tasks with a specific tag.

The @all tag
If you add this tag to your search it will return all tasks, even if they’re deleted, belong to a different user in your team, and so on.

@deleted and @completed/@done
Add these tags if you want to search for previously deleted or completed tasks.

Flags
You can search for tasks with a specific flag with the ordinary tags: @deleted, @important, @billable and @waiting.

Search based on deadline
When you use the tag @today, you’ll search for all tasks that people in your team have planned to do today. Do you want to know if Bob is going to work on any important tasks today? Just type “@bob @important @today” and you’ll find out! Aside from @today, we also have the @thisweek tag, that will return all tasks scheduled for this week.

You can also search based on deadline, with the tags @due, @duetoday, @duetomorrow, and so on. With these tags you can quickly find upcoming deadlines. With month tags you’ll find tasks due in that month (@september to find all tasks due in September). And finally, you can use day tags. Use @wednesday to find which tasks are due this Wednesday.

Actually, there’s one last feature: @overdue. This will give you all tasks that have not met their deadline.

Mix and match!
All the tricks combined above can be combined to get exactly the search results you need. Want to find all tasks that are important, need to be discussed, and are due this week? Now you can: “@discuss @important @duethisweek”. Want to find all tasks with an @email tag, in the projects Marketing or Sales? Just as easy: “@email @marketing @sales”.

Saving search results

You can save your searches, so you can get back to them in a couple of clicks!

Show deleted or completed tasks

Click on options (next to the input bar) and you’ll find two new links “Show completed” and “Show deleted”. These links will show all the tasks you’ve previously completed/deleted for the selected user and project.

Undelete tasks

Re-open tasks

And a couple of smaller changes

- When you now view the task list of the entire team (by selecting “All” from the user list at the top right) the tasks are sorted by deadline first, and then grouped by the person responsible.

- You can now use accented letters (such as é and è) in your display name (nickname).

- We’ve added an option for recurring tasks. You can now select “weekday”, to get tasks to repeat every Monday through Friday, or you can use the @every-weekday tag when you create the task.

- You can use month tags, such as @september or @nov, to give set the deadline of that task to the last day of that month.

- More helpful date descriptions when you hover on deadlines. Example: “Thursday 2 weeks from now (9/3/2009)”

What’s Next

As mentioned in our last blog post, we’re also working on new team features; we’ll have an announcement about that soon. Hope you enjoy the new features!

Preview upcoming Features

In the past two weeks we’ve been working on the last features we want to add before the release. Although they’re still in development, two of these new features we want to release soon, and we want to show you a preview. We think these features will make working with Thymer it even faster, and make it really easy to work across different teams (companies, organizations, etc.)

Search

One of the new features is a powerful Search. You can use it to search through all tasks and comments in Thymer, so you’ll find everything back in an instant. The Search can also be used for specific queries and sorting. When we release the feature we’ll write about all the possibilities. For now, here’s a preview of searching for all tasks due today, ordered by responsible person:

Multi-Teams

Quite some users are working on multiple accounts. For example, you could do some consulting work for one company, work in another team and have a personal account. To make it easier to work with multiple teams, we’re going to allow Thymer users to be part of multiple teams, with a sample way to switch views. Currently, the name of the Team (or your personal account) you’re working with can be seen under the Thymer logo. In the following screenshot, it’s the team of ExampleCom Inc.

With the upcoming feature, you can be part of multiple teams; to switch to another team just hover over the Team name to access the team menu. Here you see all your memberships, and switching view is done with a single click.

It will also be possible to invite existing Thymer users to your teams.

More news soon!

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.