We grew!
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 by Emily Boyd
We're really excited to announce today that we have a new member of the RTM team — and it's a human! (Unlike the last time…)
Ab recently graduated with his Computer Science degree from the University of New South Wales and, like the rest of the team, resides in Sydney.
When he's not busy coding, Ab enjoys playing soccer and trivia, and eating icecream. The particularly observant among you might note that Ab shares a surname with another RTM team member… yes, he's Omar's younger brother :)
Welcome to the team, Ab!
Scheduled maintenance
Sunday, March 23, 2008 by Emily Boyd
Remember The Milk will be down for scheduled maintenance today, starting at 2:30pm Sydney time (view in your timezone). The site will be down for up to two hours while we perform some upgrades, and we'll post again here once we're done. Thank you for your patience! :)
Tip: You might be aware that you can use RTM with Google Gears to manage your tasks while offline. Provided you have it set up prior to our scheduled maintenance, you can use this feature to manage your tasks while RTM is offline too — your changes during this period will be synchronized when RTM returns from maintenance.
Update 5:00PM Sydney time: We're back! It took a little longer than expected. Thanks to an unfortunate series of events, as we were bringing the site back up, our office lost both its primary and backup Internet connections… doh! After relocating so we could access the Internet (and the RTM servers!) again, we were able to complete the maintenance. Thanks again for your patience!
Half a million organized people
Wednesday, March 19, 2008 by Emily Boyd
We could never have imagined this when we started Remember The Milk, but we're ecstatic to have reached 500,000 users! (That's Bob with his ecstatic face above… I know it looks a lot like his regular face, but trust me, he's happy.)
We wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who's contributed to the development of RTM over the past few years. From those who've sent feedback and helped us to shape new features, to those who've spotted and reported annoying bugs, to those who've helped to make RTM available in new languages, to those who've supported us with Pro accounts… THANK YOU!! We wouldn't be here without you.
Q&A time!
Wednesday, March 19, 2008 by Emily Boyd
I figured it might be fun to answer some of the questions that people often ask us in person about RTM — if you've got a question that's not answered here, send it to us, and maybe we'll do a follow up Q&A post. :)
How many people work on RTM?
It's just the two of us. :) Two humans, that is — Bob and Cow are of course crucial to the team. Hiroshi also helps us out by writing the Japanese blog (thanks, Hiroshi!).
So who does what?
Omar writes all the code, and there's a lot of that these days! (We're up to 213,000 lines of code, including 50,000 lines of JavaScript.) He's also our sys admin, so he makes sure that the servers are happy. I do all the designy stuff (like the UI), handle support, and (as you may have noticed :) do most of the blogging.
How long have you been working on RTM?
It's coming up to 4 years… wow, that seems like a long time! It's weird to think we were 21 year olds when we started — we knew nothing back then (and probably not a whole lot more now! :)
Where are you guys located?
Sydney, Australia. The only bad thing about being in Sydney is the timezone — we try to be awake for daytime in the US (where a lot of RTM users are located), so you could say that we have "interesting" sleep patterns. :)
Are all the RTM servers and stuff in Australia too?
Nope. All our infrastructure is in the US, in datacenters in Dallas and Seattle. This allows RTM to load and function as quickly as possible; we don't want to slow you down when you're managing your tasks!
What's your development environment like?
We develop on both Linux and OS X, use SVN for source control (we're in the process of switching to Mercurial), and edit with Vim, Emacs, and TextMate. Well, one of us uses Vim… the other uses Emacs, which is obviously better ;)
What language is RTM written in?
Why use one when you can use a whole bunch? :) RTM is a mix of PHP, Python, C, and lots of JavaScript. We use a lot of open source, and also try to give back to the community (more on that in an upcoming blog post!).
Lastly, how do you decide which features to add next?
That's up to you! While obviously we're not able to implement every single suggestion that we receive (as much as we would like to please everybody, that would be thousands of features!), we do consider each feedback as we decide what to work on next. Please tell us what you'd like to see. :)
Join Bob in the Pro Tester Program
Friday, March 14, 2008 by Emily Boyd
Remember The Milk's new features go through a rigorous testing program, headed up by Bob T. Monkey (seen above in his high-tech "lab"). New features are always top secret, so nobody apart from Bob and the rest of the RTM team sees them before launch.
The problem is that Bob is just one monkey. He doesn't have access to every browser and operating system combination, and he doesn't own every mobile device in the world (just most of them, judging by the photo — why does a monkey need that many phones?!).
To help Bob out with all that testing, today we're launching the Pro Tester Program. PTP members will be given pre-release versions of new RTM features to try out, and will be invited to provide feedback and help us by reporting any problems encountered with said new features.
There are only two requirements to join. You'll need:
- An RTM Pro account (the "Pro" bit of "Pro Tester Program").
- The ability to keep a secret (you'll be testing features that aren't available to the public yet!).
Sound interesting? Join the Pro Tester Program and help Bob today :)
Remember The Milk in Upgrade Your Life
Thursday, March 13, 2008 by Emily Boyd
We're big Lifehacker fans here at Remember The Milk, so we were super excited to see that the second edition of Gina Trapani's Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, is now shipping from Amazon… and we were even more excited when we saw that we were in it! :)
The book is a compilation of the best 116 hacks and downloads from Lifehacker's archives, and hack #34 is "Organize Your Life with Remember The Milk". Awesome!
Thanks to Gina for including us! For all kinds of cool hacks to help you work smarter, faster, and better, check it out :)
Bob meets his idols at FOWA Miami
Thursday, March 13, 2008 by Emily Boyd
We recently had the pleasure of visiting Miami for Future of Web Apps, where I was lucky enough to get to speak about RTM (if you're interested in that talk, you can read more about it in this article).
One of the best parts of FOWA Miami was all the awesome people who we got to hang out with. Bob especially enjoyed meeting many people he admires in the web world, and of course insisted on having his picture taken at every opportunity :)
A big thanks to Ryan and the rest of the Carsonified crew for a fun event!
2008 Webware 100 Finalist
Sunday, March 9, 2008 by Emily Boyd
We were excited to learn that Remember The Milk has been selected as a finalist in CNET's 2008 Webware 100 Awards (yay!). It's an honour to be included! The winners are decided by a public vote (you can vote for RTM here if you're interested :)
Twittering again
Sunday, March 9, 2008 by Emily Boyd
Some users of Remember The Milk for Twitter, particularly those new to the feature, may have experienced a frustrating problem with sending messages to rtm on Twitter over the past few weeks.
Messages sent via Twitter weren't making it through to our side for some users (making it impossible to add tasks), as Twitter would insist that you needed to follow rtm first, even when you were already following it!
We're happy to say that the Twitter folks have now fixed the issue — thanks Alex, Crystal, Blaine, and the rest of the team! :) I know that a whole bunch of RTM users have been patiently waiting for this feature to work for their Twitter accounts, so please feel free to try it out again now if you've been experiencing difficulties recently.