A focus area used to belong to one person. Now you can invite others into it. Writing a thesis with a friend, studying for the same exam, building a side project with two other people: make it one focus area and the hours add up in one place.
Open a focus area's settings and you will find a new People section. Invite people lets you pick from the people who follow you, or copy a link to send anywhere; someone who joins through the link and is new to Roomie counts as your referral too. A focus area holds up to eight people. Anyone in it can invite, the owner can remove people or hand the area over, and anyone else can leave whenever they like.
Your hours stay yours. When you accept an invitation you choose: Bring my progress, which moves the sessions, weekly goal and books from one of your own focus areas into the shared one, or Start fresh. If you leave later, you choose again. Take your hours with you into a personal copy of the area, or leave them counting toward the team.
The focus area page stays quiet about all this. The people you share it with appear as a small row of faces next to the title, with a dot on whoever is focusing right now. When a teammate is already in, the start button reads Focus with Sam instead of Start focusing. And while your own session is running, the button stops asking you to start: it says you are focusing, shows the clock, and takes you back to the timer. The owner can set a weekly team goal, which shows as a single bar under your own goal.
In Live, people who are focusing in the same shared area now appear as one card: their faces side by side, "Sam & Ali", focusing together. Everyone sees it this way, including people who only follow them, but the name of the focus area is shown to its members and nobody else. Tap the card to see who is behind it.
A few more things come along:
- A nudge when a teammate starts. At most one push per teammate every few hours, never one per session. Switch it off per focus area under People.
- High fives. When a teammate finishes a session you get a small note with a one tap high five, and they see it right away.
- Books. The Library tab of a shared area shows what your teammates are reading for it under your own shelf, with how far along they are.
- GitHub. Every member can link the repositories they work in. You can unlink your own, the owner can unlink any, and the commits you push during a session are found with your own GitHub account.
- Team up suggestions. If someone you follow, who follows you back, keeps a focus area with the same name as one of yours, Roomie may suggest doing it together.
A shared focus area cannot also have a public page for now. Turn one off to use the other.