Prime Timetable 3.0 is here

"Dear timetablers,
I am proud to announce the release of new Prime Timetable 3.0 which brings the latest innovations in school timetabling at your fingertips and mouse clicks. Thanks to you I have grown much wiser and learned a lot ow(l)ing to your great online feedback and ideas, 90% of which has already been implemented! We are eagerly waiting for your new ideas and in the meantime check out our new features."

Accessible anywhere

Prime Timetable works on Mac, Windows and Linux, as well as in any modern browser but this time we have made it accessible on any device. In other words, now you can use your phone to sign in and browse through your school timetables. Also, the teachers and students you have shared your timetable with can view it on their phone.

The app is entirely built using standard web technologies accessible everywhere. Experience all advantages of sharing your school timetable on iPhone, iPad, Android, or any other smartphone or tablet.

3D school timetable

How to spot a conflict in a 2D timetable? How to discover that under a card there is another card or many more? The answer is simple. Prime Timetable will automatically rotate each conflicted card by 15° to the left and right respectively. Also, each card has its own Z-order on Z-axis, thus creating a 3D timetable. To emphasize 3D even more, the shadow of the card being dragged is darker when dragged over the conflicted cards and lighter when there are no cards below. Clicking a card at the bottom brings it to the front, while other cards automatically rearrange. As always, to bring you the best timetabling experience all rearranging, rotating and moving is smoothly animated.

Extra views

Extra views are a great help if you want to adjust cards using only drag & drop (also known as manual timetabling). These views are fully interactive, just like the main view, meaning you can use all timetabling tools as usual, e.g. timetable generator, drag & drop, pin, sponge, undo/redo, etc. Of course, all opened timetable views will be automatically updated.

To open extra timetable view just click on teacher, class, room or subject icon in the bottom left corner when a card is selected. You can easily adjust the position and size of extra view which best fits your screen and display single extra view by clicking the first column.

Currently selected card in one view will be highlighted in all other views. Also, when doing drag & drop, the shadow of the card being dragged will be shown in all opened views, which allows you to track drop position, e.g. check that drop position is not already scheduled in another view.

Share timetable

Prime Timetable makes sharing easy: just choose 'Share -> Publish to the Web', click Publish to the Web button and voila! Your timetable will be visible to anyone you've shared the link with. The published web page is accessible by any device.

You needn't worry about any subsequent changes to the published timetable as it will be automatically updated when the timetable is saved. Furthermore, the published web page will refresh every 20 minutes to ensure the latest timetable version is delivered to all.

Online and offline timetabling

In case your school doesn't have reliable Internet connection or you would like to use Prime Timetable instantly from your desktop without going to web site and signing in, we now support both online and offline school timetabling.

Even if the Internet connection drops or you are only occasionally connected you can still continue working on your timetable. When the Internet connection is back, your local changes will be synchronized with our server so that you can share your timetable with others.

For our premium customers we've even enabled entirely offline timetabling work. Just go to Help -> Options and click Install Prime Timetable button which will install the software on your computer. You will get the newly installed program in Program Files and a new desktop icon. Starting Prime Timetable from your desktop allows you to access your timetables whenever you want with or without Internet connection and thus avoid going to Prime Timetable web site and signing in.

New design

Instead of Microsoft Office ribbon we have introduced good old wooden board and instead of classical popups we have turned to recycled paper as the background of our forms. Luckily, no trees were harmed or cut down while turning our user interface into more eco-friendly environment :). We hope you like our new redesign!

New timetabling tools and options

Pin , sponge and zoom make timetabling more productive, yet game-like. All timetable view operations such as drag & drop, pin, zoom, print, undo/redo and others are also available in single class, teacher, room and subject view and extra views. To select single view just click on the first column in a timetable row.

The new Help -> Options form allows you to tailor the app to suit your needs, e.g. you can set default timetable view, set save reminder interval, set whether conflicted cards need to rotate, show or hide rooms in single view, show subjects in teacher view, show period intervals instead of numbers, show additional time request settings, exclude fake lessons while generating the timetable and Install Prime Timetable on your desktop.

Other improvements

There are lots of other improvements, such as lesson statistics and filtering, browsing timetables using back and forward, keyboard shortcuts. We have made Prime Timetable Manual in PDF format for download and print for those who don't want to browse online help,

Timetable view performances are vastly improved so that large schools with 200 and more subjects/teachers can use our software without interruptions. Furthermore, our software will automatically adjust according to your computer's performances, e.g. faster computers will display card animations, while slower computers won't have such smooth experience. Talking about performances, timetable loading, importing and saving is 10x faster now!

What is next?

Since Prime Timetable is an online software as a service, you can expect frequent updates and improvements soon. Your feedback is crucial and therefore we have created Prime Timetable user voice, where you can shape the product to suite your needs by entering a new idea or voting for existing ones.