Hiveminder Pro launches today

Today, we're releasing Hiveminder Pro, a major update to our online task management system. Here at Best Practical, we're addicted to Hiveminder's slick, simple task tracking and sharing, but that's not too surprising-- we built Hiveminder to be the shared todo list we always wanted. You don't have to take it from us, though. Sarah Linder of the Austin American-Statesman writes:

"I am crazy about Hiveminder. I started using the online to-do list a little more than a year ago, and we're very content together. I had been lost, adrift -- trying different ways to track my stuff, but never settling down. Hiveminder made me less flaky, less absent-minded, less likely to wake up at 3 a.m. realizing I had forgotten something important. Hiveminder, you complete me."

If you've never used Hiveminder, let me take a moment to run through some of what I think are its most interesting features:

Braindump

You've got a lot on your mind. Getting all the stuff you need to do out of your head and into a trusted tool like Hiveminder can make the difference between a good day and a day struggling to get anything done. With Braindump, you can just type out a list of what you need to do - just like writing it up on paper or in Notepad. Hiveminder will turn your notes into a todo list, looking for email addresses, due dates, categories and hints that something might be important. There's a braindump box on every page, but you can focus in on braindump at http://hiveminder.com/braindump

Task Review

If you're like me, you have a few hundred items on your todo list. Some of them are work tasks that I really need to get to today and some are little home repair tasks that I can put off for another few months. Task Review walks you through everything on your todo list one at a time. You get to make some simple decisions about each task: Is it done? Can I do it today? Can I get someone else to do it? How long should I hide it away for? At the end of the review, you're left with a pared down list of things you can get done today. Do a review and declutter your list: http://hiveminder.com/review

History

Just as important as knowing what you do is knowing what you've already done. Hiveminder keeps track of all the changes you make to your tasks, so you can get a full history of an individual task later. That means we can also show you what's happened to your tasks today, yesterday or any day in the past. You can get a peek of what your tasks have been up to today at: http://hiveminder.com/on/today

Sharing

One of the strengths of any web-based application is how easy it becomes to share things. Hiveminder is no exception. We built it from the ground up to make it easy to share one task or thousands. You can easily assign a task to another person just by setting the task's owner field to their email address. Hiveminder will make sure they get email telling them that you need them to do something. They don't even have to be a Hiveminder user. We'll send them a URL which lets them access their task without signing up. Once you have a few more tasks to share or a few people you regularly share tasks with, you can create a group and invite other users to join you. Everybody in the group can see all the group's tasks (though you can control who can edit them), you can assign tasks to individual users and everybody can share a list of what needs doing.

Hiveminder integrates with everything

Whether you're a Googleista using the iGoogle and Google Calendar widgets, a Mac user browsing your todos with our iCal feeds or reading a feed of tasks in Bloglines or Google Reader, your tasks are always at your fingertips. If you live in your IM client, HMTasks is always around to chat with. The friendly little bot can tell you about what you need to do today and take notes when something new comes to mind. Browser search box integration for Firefox and IE7 lets you search Hiveminder and even braindump new tasks, no matter where on the web you are. I haven't even gotten into our commandline tools or Web API, but if that's what you're into, you can find out more at http://hiveminder.com/tools

...and more

I haven't mentioned tags, our innovative "but first...and then" organizational system, printing support, incoming email addresses, the mobile and mini user interfaces or any of a host of other features, but if you visit http://hiveminder.com today, you can find out more about them.

Last February, PC World Magazine ranked Hiveminder as one of the best Todo list apps on the web. Since then, we've been hard at work to make Hiveminder even better:

We've improved performance across the board
We've added new Google Calendar and iGoogle integrations
We've added new AOL IM and Jabber chat interfaces
We've significantly improved the API (more on that in the next few weeks)
We've added integrations with Firefox and IE7
We've cleaned up and streamlined the interface
We've made repeating tasks easier to use ...and a whole bunch more

Today, we're launching Hiveminder Pro. It's $30/year (but read on to find out how to save a few bucks.) For your money, you get:

Reports

Pretty charts and graphs are a great motivator and they can provide useful input about how you work. One of the folks here at Best Practical found out that he tends to get more work done on Wednesday than on every other day of the week combined and that his most productive times are when everyone else is out of the office at lunch. Of course, Hiveminder Pro reports are also available for your groups, so you can see who's overloaded, who's slacking off and whether you're getting ahead or falling behind. To turn on graphs and charts, visit https://hiveminder.com/pro

Attachments

Many of you who use Hiveminder to collaborate with team members both inside and outside your organization have told us that you'd really like to use Hiveminder to share documents related to your tasks. The wait is over. As of today, each Pro user has a 500MB task attachment quota. You can work with attachments through the Web UI or simply attach them to tasks you create by email. Attachments you sent in before we created Pro accounts will magically appear when you upgrade at http://hiveminder.com/pro

Saved lists

Hiveminder makes it easy to search and sort your task list. But until today, you needed to redo your searches day after day. Hiveminder Pro gives you a "Save list" link on every task list. It's easy to build a list of all items tagged "shopping" or everything you need to do for your boss. We have a bunch more things you'll be able to do with your saved lists soon, too! To start saving your lists, visit http://hiveminder.com/pro

SSL Security

On today's wider web, protecting your information from prying eyes is increasingly important to many of you. Hiveminder has always protected your password when you log in, but today we've enabled SSL (https) encrypted logins for ALL Hiveminder users. Pro users can choose to protect all their interactions with Hiveminder by visiting https://hiveminder.com to log in. To protect your account with SSL, visit http://hiveminder.com/pro

with.hm

I've saved my favorite for last. Hiveminder has always made it easy for you to create incoming addresses so others can send you tasks by email, but until today it was still hard to assign a task to someone else from your email client. Today, we're introducing a never-before-seen way to talk to an application from any email client.

Once you set up your secret code in your Hiveminder Pro settings, you can send a task to anyone on the planet by appending ".mysecret.with.hm" to their email address. You don't need to do anything to configure your email client.

If I wanted to ask the president to give me a balanced budget, I'd open up my email client and dash off a note like this:

To: president@whitehouse.gov.mysecret.with.hm Subject: Balanced budget, please?

It would be great if you could take care of this next week!

Thanks, Jesse

Hiveminder Pro will make a task and notify the President that I've assigned him a task. If he's an existing Hiveminder user, the task will pop into his todo list. If not, he'll get an email with a URL to view and reply to the task I assigned him. To get started assigning
tasks by email, just visit http://hiveminder.com/pro

It's time to go Pro!

Hiveminder Pro accounts are just $30/year, but since you're a friend of ours (or a friend of a friend), we'd like to offer you (and your friends) an additional $5 discount. Just enter LAUNCHCODE at https://hiveminder.com/account/upgrade. The coupon is good through February first.

If you know someone (or many someones) who could use the gift of productivity, you can use your coupon to give them Hiveminder Pro at https://hiveminder.com/account/gift

In the coming weeks and months, we'll be adding a number of other really cool features to Hiveminder and Hiveminder Pro. We'd love to hear your feature suggestions. Just drop them in the "feedback" box on the left-hand side of every page on the site.

Be Productive,

Jesse, for Hiveminder