we are proud to tell you that we are almost ready to go out of the beta phase. During the last weeks we added a ton of cool stuff, which we would like to introduce you to:

1. Statistics: In the magic box you now find a new tab called ‘Stats’. In it you find a rough outline about your accomplishments during the last seven days (today excluded). Also, there is a way to track your best and worst day, week and month. The formula by which we do the calculation is explained in the help section
2. Tasklets: You notice in the box where you add a task (called “task adder”), that there is a new checkbox “Time”. If you leave that unchecked and associate a context with the task (by appending a colon and the first letter of the context to the task name; for example ‘:h’ for a context “Household”) it will be added to a separate box, underneath your tasklist. Tasklets are intended to be tasks that need to be done, but are not scheduled for a specific day yet. It’s good to use tasklets when you tend to have long tasklists. There will be a new list created for every context. Other than that, you can also drag and drop tasklets around to different contexts and sort them within their same context list. If that all sounds a little new and complex to you now, head on over to the Tasklet Help Page to read all about it.
3. Work Orders: You can now set up work orders in PostTask, which is basically giving the tasks scheduled for today a specific order in which you will tackle them. Read about it here.
4. All the help pages have been polished and a new ‘Tips’ tab is now in the magic box. It shows you our keyboard shortcuts in a much more human readable format (as a table).
5. We have a new design, if you haven’t noticed yet. It’s much like the old one, but it was tweaked a lot. :]
6. There is a new tab “Pulse” in the magic box. There we have the latest news on what we are currently working on PostTask-wise (yeah we don’t work all the time on PostTask). There are some good hints on upcoming features sometimes
7. We made a little thing that will load PostTask up very quickly, then greys out the screen and you can watch all components load in the background. This significantly increases initial response time.
8. We have made a ton of speed improvements, much of which will be exposed to the public in a blogpost on the debuggable.com soon.

Please ensure to email us your feedback to feedback at posttask dot com.

Best for the day,
Tim and Felix

It’s no secret anymore: PostTask has gone live! At least to a certain degree. We have transformed our private beta into a public one to get more feedback from people interested in the application. There are some issues here and there, but the site should be usable.

If you are here for the first time and don’t quite know what you can do with PostTask, make sure to read this post about it and refer to the Help System to learn about all the goodies we provide you with. We allow plenty more actions than is first noticeable. Read in the help section and learn about all the hidden features.

That being said we’re working very hard to push a new version out soon. A new layout has been designed and several small improvements are on their way. But since lots of things will stay like they are and we won’t ignore our users, we’d like to get as much feedback on our current progress as possible. Therefore email us at: feedback@debuggable.com ; ).

What happens after the public beta ends?

Well, PostTask.com is going to be a commercial application. The basic time management functionality is going to remain available for free, but everything in the magic box (the thing on the right side) will be part of one or more plans one has to subscribe to. For you testers this means: We’ll give you a grace period of ~2 weeks after we launch where you can still use the commercial features for free. After that we are going to downgrade your accounts to the free plan and you must be aware that this will cause you to loose access to any data you entered inside the magic box.

However, we really appreciate your support and will make promotion codes for discounts available to you (besides the fact that we’re not going to rip you off to begin with : ). We will also provide free accounts for those of you who send us lots of feedback and bug reports.

So anyway, we hope you enjoy our little application and we’re excited about the news things to come!

Thanks,
Tim & Felix

Hey folks,

after some internal discussions we came to the conclusion that we didn’t like the way goals are currently implemented / that we can do better.

In the next ~2-3 days we are therefor going to remove them from PostTask.com and replace them with something new called “Ideals”.

If you’re familiar with Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues then this should make sense right to you right away. Basically the idea is to list all ideals / virtues you are interested in pursuing and to rate your current state on a scale from 1-5 (we got one of them nifty star rating pickers for that). PostTask.com will then sort your list, always showing you the ideals you need to work on most first. So from time to time you can then look at your list and decide what you need to work on more or where you made progress or had fallbacks. Whenever you change your rating on an ideal, PostTask.com will keep history of it so in a later version we’ll be able to offer you reports on the progress of your personal development over time.

If you have problems thinking of ideals you want to follow other then your typical new years resolution “loose weight”, “quit smoking”, etc. then check out this post by Steve Pavlina on the topic.

“What about actual goals, the stuff that can actually be accomplished once and forever?” you might ask. Well fear not, we are also working on a new version of what will most likely be called “Goals” again and that connects directly with the time tracking and tasks of PostTask.com. But we’re currently still doing the mockups for that, so please bear with us for a week or so before we get those done ; ).

Felix & Tim

we just tweaked the behavior of the time picker a bit. If you haven’t noticed already, so far it has been behaving like this: If you had a 1h task with 50% progress  and you changed the time to 2h then the progress would automatically go to 25% because PostTask assumes you want to add more time to the task. Usually that is exactly what one would want the application to do. However, if you mark a 1h task as done, but it ended up taking you 1:15h, then this behavior gets into your way as it resets the progress from 100% to 80% and you have to manually adjust the progress again.

Not anymore! If you know hold down the “Alt” key while clicking on the time of a task, it will make no adjustments to the tasks progress. Which means no more double editing for you!

We hope some of you will enjoy it : )

we just fixed a weird bug that would cause tasks to double in size after a drag & drop to a different day. ‘Do Homework’ would turn into ‘Do HomeworkDo Homework’ - no good. Turns out this was a little left-over from the recent switch to jQuery UI but nothing serious.

Meanwhile Tim and I are working hard on getting automated billing working so we can finally launch and move on to implement more fun features. If you’re interested in pricing: We’re aiming at a monthly fee of $5 for the application as it is right now, and newly developed functionality would get packaged with more expensive plans. If you have any thoughts about this, feel free to comment : ).

lately we’ve been toying around with how we could add new features to the application in the future without destroying its nice and light-weight interface. Here is how we could imagine this to work:

The idea is to add some “tabs” below the current task. They would only show up if they are actually used, but you could also configure certain “tabs” to be always visible. If a task is using no tabs yet, you could simply add one by using a little drop-down menu that activates when you hover it and which is represented by a little icon right next to the text (not shown in this picture).

Please let us know what you think about this and what you’re ideas about adding new features are!

Thanks!

until now there was a problem with the blog running under http://posttask.com instead of http://www.posttask.com, which resulted in it being unable to track your login state. This means that you would still see the top navigation links as if you were logged in, although you weren’t.

It has now been fixed. Please enjoy!

we just wanted to let you know that we’ve done some updates to our underlaying JS architecture:

• We are now using the latest version of jQuery (1.2.1)
• We are now using jQuery UI instead of the Interface library.
• As of now we’ve reduced the number of HTTP requests made per page refresh to about 50%. This was made possible by adding a packaging script that throws all our common JS includes into one file when needed.

So far it looks like all the improvements are working smoothly, but please let us know if you experience any problems so we can fix them.

Also, when you hover over the little arrow that you can use for switching to the next week, you now get a date picker drop down where you can easily jump to any day into the future!

here is another update. You may have noticed those little dashed underlines in the weekday scroller at the top of your tasklist already. They are indicating that you have already booked a task for that particular day, which might come in handy if you plan ahead.

Also, when you hover over the days, the tooltip will tell you how many tasks you have created already for that day.

The design (dashed underlines) might change and also the weekday scroller is not automatically updated yet when you add / delete a task. This will be implemented soon, though.

Happy tasking all! :]