We’re starting a whole series about tiny details on the Goplan interface and functionality that you might not know about. And since this is something we’ve gotten some feedback on, we’ll start by showcasing some of the ways to input dates and times into things like the Goplan calendar or Task due times.

Thanks to some Ruby on Rails trickery, our time input is quite flexible - one of the reasons why you don’t see the typical calendar popups like on a few other sites. Here’s a few examples of how you can type in times and dates on Goplan:

Above: the default (and quite clunky) method of typing in dates by writing them out in the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format. It works, but it’s quite a hassle if you want to be really specific. Let’s see how to make it a little better.

Above: If you want to type in times in an easier way you can type in times like “3pm”, “4am”, “5:30pm”. Makes it a little easier - although that’s definitely not the end of it.

Above: Have something you need to do tomorrow and don’t want to type in the whole date? Here comes the trickery: writing “tomorrow” works just as expected. You can also combine words with times in the shorter format, so writing something like “today 10pm” or “tomorrow 3am” will return the expected time.

Above: The trickery goes even further - you can type in dates relative to the current date in plain english. An example would be “two days from now”, which in our case (since it’s July 2nd) would return the 4th of July. Finally (and as you’d likely expect by now), you can combine the previous example with simple time inputs by writing “one month from now 1pm”, which is admittedly much easier to write than “2007-07-02 13:00″.

Time input is just one of the tiny bits of functionality that makes it much easier to use Goplan to manage your projects. There’s a few other hints that we’ll get into soon - so keep an eye out on this blog.