An extraordinarily belated happy 2009!
Wow, 2009 is really flying by isn’t it? It seems like yesterday we were celebrating Christmas and New Years and here we are in February already. If this first month or so is anything to go by, 2009 will zip past before we know it! We’re (more than a little bit) late, but happy 2009 everyone! :)
We’ve been really busy this last month which is probably why time is flying by. We’ve been working away on RTM (we read every forum post so if you have a idea, make sure you leave us a note); a new team member has joined us (she’ll be introducing herself shortly); and we’ve been meeting with two of our engineers for the first time this past week (Arty and Michael flew all the way from Moscow and Mexico City, respectively, to Sydney; more on that in another post).
We figured we’d kick off the year with a quick recap of RTM happenings over the past 12 months, in case you missed anything! We’ve got lots of stuff planned for 2009, so make sure you subscribe to our blog feed to keep up-to-date. We hope your year is off to a wonderful start!
iPhone app, at long last
It’s no secret that we’re big iPhone fans here, so we had a lot of fun developing (and subsequently launching!) our iPhone app, trying to pack in as many features as we could to give you the power of all of RTM in your pocket. The resulting app is available as a free download on the App Store for RTM Pro users.
Gadget for Gmail
Combining our love of both Gmail and gadgets, we launched an RTM gadget for Gmail Labs, which can handily be added to the left nav of any Gmail account. Convenient access to RTM alongside your mail, full of task management goodness!
We grew!
This past year we’re very excited to have four new members on the RTM team: Ab Kilani, Arvid Bux, Artemy Tregubenko, and Michael Wolf (residing in Australia, The Netherlands, Russia, and Mexico respectively). Our team is getting pretty global; we now have most continents covered… we’ll have to work on that.
New ways to interact with your tasks
The list of new ways to use RTM in our Services section continues to grow, thanks to the awesome folks creating handy tools from Dashboard widgets to Ubiquity commands using the RTM API. If you feel inspired, read up on the API docs and start hacking. :)
MilkSync + BlackBerry = sync goodness
Early in 2008 we launched a much-requested new Pro feature, MilkSync for BlackBerry. W00t! This was our second app based on the MilkSync task synchronization platform, after MilkSync for Windows Mobile.
Speaking new languages
We’re extremely grateful to all the translation volunteers who’ve continued to help make RTM and its features available in new languages. Thanks again, everyone! :) RTM now speaks 31 languages! We added seven entirely new localizations this year (Albanian, Catalan, Esperanto, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Ukrainian, and Vietnamese) and have continued to make new features available in the already launched languages.
Bring on the browsers
It was a big year for browsers; we welcomed Firefox 3 and Google Chrome as officially supported browsers for RTM. We’re always busy tweaking things to make sure that RTM is as fast as possible in each browser, and like to take advantage of cool new stuff that allows you to do new things with your browser (like launching RTM offline from your desktop with Gears).
Testing, testing
We launched the Pro Tester Program back in March, giving program members access to pre-release versions of new RTM features to try out. To everyone who’s helped us with testing so far, a big thank you! :)
Blogging news
We added a new status blog in October, to provide updates on RTM and its services. A quick reminder: please check it out if you’d like to keep in the loop about upgrades, outages, and related issues! (You can also follow rtmstatus on Twitter for updates.) We’ll also be trying to blog more frequently on our official blog (hint: the one you’re reading!), especially sharing more tips and tricks like Doug Ireton’s fantastic guest post on advanced GTD with RTM that I know many folks enjoyed.
Bob’s crazy adventures
Of course, Bob T. Monkey couldn’t resist more adventuring this past year. He headed to Tokyo for our first ever RTM meetup, travelled halfway around the world to meet some of his idols at FOWA Miami, hung out at WWDC and picked up an Apple Design Award, and hosted a wild party for RTM’s third birthday. What a big year for a small monkey!
