Helicoid's Blog

Support Helipad

Alex Young — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:13:09 BST

Helipad is our free notepad web app, which we’ve been running since 2006. It’s still going strong, and people keep discovering it every day. If you enjoy using Helipad, here are a few ways you can support it to ensure continued development:

Buy the iPhone Helipad app: a new version has been submitted to the App Store with iPhone OS 3.0 support which fixes a syncing glitch
Try Deadline which works with your Helipad login and has an iPhone app (submitted to the store this week)
Share Helipad with your friends and colleagues
Hang out with us and tell us what features you’d like to see in the future
Follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook page
Blog about Helipad! We have press resources with nice icons
Build stuff with the API
Try our other products, which are all listed on our company’s web site: helicoid.net

Using Deadline Everywhere

Alex Young — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:58:28 BST

The ways Deadline can be accessed has grown to ridiculous proportions. Here’s a summary of the apps, tools and hacks that work with it.

Mac Desktop

Deadline will work with your Mac’s desktop. For more details, read the initial blog announcement. Download Deadline for Mac here.

Mobile

Visit /mob to access Deadline’s cut-down mobile version: deadlineapp.com/mob

SMS

We’ve had strong feedback from the people on the closed SMS beta, so we’ll roll this out with payment plans soon. Contact us if you want to try it for free until that happens.

Email

Did you know you can email reminders to Deadline? Click Help, Email Input to get your customised email address. It’s handy to add this to your computer and phone address books so you can quickly email Deadline wherever you are.

Jabber/Gtalk

I’ve recently been working on making the Deadline Jabber/Gtalk bots respond faster, and they’re working better than ever now. You can add talk@deadlineapp.com or deadline@helicoid.net (for Google Hosted Gtalk) to your buddy lists to talk to Deadline. It’ll send you reminders and also let you schedule and search them.

Fluid

Deadline is designed to work with Fluid. For more information on using site-specific browsers with Deadline, visit deadlineapp.com/ssb

Mozilla Ubiquity

If you’re a fan of Ubiquity, check out our Deadline Ubiquity scripts. This allows you to schedule and search reminders from within Firefox.

API

Deadline also has an XML API so you can make your own applications with it. I’m currently building an iPhone app that uses it.

Deadline and Helipad Sign-In Glitch

Alex Young — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:50:40 BST

We had a glitch with our servers last night that meant people couldn’t sign-in to Deadline or Helipad. It was caused by an outage at our ISP. We have dedicated servers with them which remained accessible, but the ISP’s DNS was down so Helipad and Deadline couldn’t resolve the address of our authentication server.

Although the outage might be regrettable, they’ve been up consistently for 3 years (other than times when we’ve had to perform upgrades). Here’s their report on the issue: Network outage 1740-2100, Sunday 10th May

Deadline for Mac

Alex Young — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:15:58 BST

DeadlineGrowl is now available for Mac OS Leopard. It works with Deadline and shows growl notifications when a deadline is due.

Get it here: DeadlineGrowl.zip

Usage

Download and unzip DeadlineGrowl
Double click DeadlineGrowl to run it
Enter your email address and password
DeadlineGrowl will now download your deadlines every 20 minutes and show a growl notification when one is due

Requirements

Mac OS Leopard
An account on Deadline

Planned features

Start on login
System-wide hotkey for Add Deadline so you can quickly add one whenever you need to
Better date input

Deadline: Notification API and GitHub support

Alex Young — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:41:46 BST

Deadline now has a notification API (and it works with GitHub). Notifications are similar to reminders, except they’re sent out in real time. Since adding notifications is so simple, you could hook up all kinds of software to Deadline to get alerts. Plus, you’ll already have configured Deadline with your preferred means of receiving reminders: email, SMS, Jabber, etc, which means you’ll get real time notifications the same way.

Notification API

Accessing the API is simple: a URL is requested with a notification description, and it will be sent out straight away by your preferred reminder methods.

Here’s how it works:

Go to Settings, Feeds/iCal
Copy the Notification URL. This URL contains your secret code (which is like a password) and your user ID
Use the URL to send a notification

Example:


curl "http://deadlineapp.com/notifications/1/93jd81/create.xml/Alert,
%20web%20server%201%20is%20down"

This will send you a notification that reads: “Alert, web server 1 is down”.

GitHub Support

You can link a GitHub project to Deadline using GitHub’s Post-Receive Hooks. This could be really useful for tracking changes to projects by co-workers when you’re out of the office (especially if you have SMS set up).

Edit one of your GitHub repositories
Click Service Hooks in the secondary navigation
Go to Settings, Feeds/iCal in Deadline
Copy the GitHub Hook URL
Paste it into GitHub’s Post-Receive URLs list and press Update Settings

You will now receive notifications when people push changes to the repository.

Helipad Mac Update

Alex Young — Wed, 1 Apr 2009 16:12:47 BST

The Helipad Mac beta has been extended. Download it here: Helipad Mac.

This will run until August. We’re working on adding Sparkle for automatic updates so upgrading will be easier soon.

Tiktrac upgraded: Times now stored in seconds

Alex Young — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:44:22 BST

Tiktrac’s times are now internally stored in seconds. This means the timer is much more intuitive. We also took this opportunity to make the timer look more like a clock:

The task entry form now displays the end date when you set the task as completed, which saves a few seconds when inputting lots of tasks.

We’ve also made the currently selected sheet clearer in the right-hand navigation.

There’s also a new manage screen which allows you to add or configure clients and sheets—administrators will see a Manage tab at the top of each page. I decided to add this page because we want to remove the right-hand sheet navigation to replace it with something that uses less space in the future.

The seconds upgrade was actually a difficult thing to do, but it’s resulted in cleaner code internally. That frees us up to implement new features soon (upgraded dashboard, navigation and invoicing).

Deadline parsing tweaks

Alex Young — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:08:27 GMT

Deadline now works with relative time:

Visit estate agent in 3 hours
Deploy Deadline upgrade in 2 days
Plan wedding next month

This update includes bug fixes, especially relating to Deadline’s recognition of ranges of time for repeating dates.

I’ve also been working on making Deadline’s email interface more user-friendly. It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s almost there.

Remember you can find us on Twitter as well as this blog: twitter.com/helicoid

Helipad updates and other news

Alex Young — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:41:01 GMT

We rolled out a few minor changes to Helipad this week:

Tags on the dashboard page can be hidden
The space usage indicator has been removed
Helipad can now be reached at helipadapp.com

We decided to drop the space limitation because we’re now selling Helipad iPhone.

Other news

Remember we also publish technical articles on insider.helicoid.net:

We’ve also started Quite Useful, a blog about useful tech-related tips and tricks.

Coming soon

Tiktrac will be moving from minutes to seconds internally, this means the timers will be more intuitive
We’re also working on a configurable dashboard for Tiktrac
Deadline iPhone is in development
Deadline SMS will continue to be free for a while because the SMS traffic is relatively low, so try it while it’s free!

New Tiktrac widget

Alex Young — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:28:41 GMT

Our new Tiktrac widget is out: get it on the Tiktrac widget page. This is an entirely new version that adds:

Timers to every task
Description editing (click a description to edit it)
Delete tasks
Error messages

This version was created by Thomas Loudon with support from Alex at Helicoid.