I just finished deploying our latest Tiktrac changes. If you’re a developer, please pay attention to the last section of this post.

Client edit page

The client edit page now makes it easy to see which sheets have been archived. It also allows you to archive all sheets quickly—look for the form that says “Archive this client” to use the feature.

Home page redesign

Tiktrac’s home page now looks more professional, and should help you find any information relating to the product that you need. This mirrors the look and feel we’ve been using on our Helicoid support sites and blogs.

XML RPC API dropped

The one major change with this version of Tiktrac is there’s no XML RPC API. We looked at the logs, and no one has used the XML RPC API for a year. Everyone has built software using our REST API instead. It took us around 200 l…

Continue reading → | tiktrac

After a long process sourcing inspiration and pouring ideas into my sketchbook, I finally finished deploying updates to all of our public-facing websites and support sites. We wanted to improve the customer experience beyond our web apps, so if you’re looking for support resources or information relating to our company and services it’ll be much easier. This means helicoid.net, support.helicoid.net, status.helicoid.net, forums.helicoid.net and our blogs have all been redesigned! (phew!)

The new designs work in modern browsers and even IE6. I also tested it on the PlayStation 3, and it looks great on big TVs!

I’ve also released search.helicoid.net, which lets you search Helicoid’s content. This is linked to from our error page…

Continue reading → | design, announcements, helicoid

We’ve recently pooled out support resources into one place, with the launch of our support page available here:

support.helicoid.net

This contains details on all the ways you can get in touch with us, including:

• Web chat and IRC (irc.helicoid.net)
• Twitter
• Contact form and phone
• Forum
• Service status page

We’ll be evolving our support site over time as we roll out new services in the near future. Note that we’re available for chat and on the phone during office hours (GMT), weekdays.

Continue reading → | announcements, support

Loom, our issue tracker, is now out for beta testing. It’s an evolution of Bugtagger, which we’ve been using internally for 2 years but never released publicly.

Features include:

• Simple, extensible design: everyone from programmers to plumbers should be able to use it
• Public forms: so if you market a product or service you can collect support requests without requiring users to have accounts on Loom
• Email integration and messages: customers can send email messages to issues
• Attachments: Attach files to issues
• Search, tags, project organisation, RSS, mobile phone support: All the usual features you’d expect form us!
• XML REST API: We’re planning on using Loom to collect support requests via our contact form, what will you use the API for?

Loom Beta accounts are free and pretty much unrestricted. Price plans on launch will…

Continue reading → | loom, announcements

Helipad’s API has been updated to improve the way it handles tags. The changes are backwards compatible so old code should still work. Read more in the Helipad API guide

Incidentally, we recently received a few questions about Helipad in our support chat room.

Q: If two people are collaborating on a document, there is no change tracking, right?

There’s currently no change tracking. Ebiwrite, a similar product produced by us, includes this and we may port it to Helipad in the future.

Q: Is there any way to get RSS or email updates?

If we do decide to implement change tracking in the future we’d add this, at the moment you’re probably better served by using the API.

We’re in our support chat room UK office hours (check the time in GMT). We sometimes hang out there after hours as well, so if you wait around you might find us. I’m there (the dev…

Continue reading → | helipad

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Sick of your desktop wallpaper? Scrap it and tr…

Continue reading → | Commissions

We’ll be performing server maintenance this weekend which may cause service interruptions for our applications. Read more on our status page.

Also, we recently fixed a bug on the Ebiwrite signup page which could cause problems when registering. If you couldn’t register you should be able to now.

Continue reading → | announcements

Helipad supports plugins and themes through add-ons. To view available add-ons, click the link at the top right of Helipad.

Installing an add-on adds a document to your account that contains the code for the add-on. This allows you to edit it, which is useful for customising themes.

Add-ons can be updated to a newer version if the author updates it by clicking on Settings and then Plugins. You can also remove add-ons here.

If you’d like to write an add-on, we’ve written some documentation on the process: Helipad add-on documentation.

Add-ons are simply an XML container that wraps JavaScript and CSS, so if you’ve got some basic web development experience you should be able to write an add-on.

Continue reading → | helipad, tips

We updated Tiktrac this morning with a neater project selector. This makes managing lots of sheets much easier for those of you with large accounts.

During the update we ran into unexpected server issues and had to perform emergency maintenance – this meant we had to take Helipad, Tiktrac and Ebiwrite down to fix the issue (they’re all on the same servers).

During this maintenance we posted updates to Twitter and our service status page. It’s worth bookmarking out status page if you rely on our services, because we post the times and dates of any planned maintenance:

http://status.helicoid.net/

Our twitter account can be found here:

http://twitter.com/helicoid

I also occasionally post technical details about what we’re working on to Twitter, so check it out!

Continue reading → | tiktrac

Helipad is now faster, prettier and easier to use!

The old “edit” and “share” tabs have been replaced with the last few documents you edited. These buttons are at the bottom of the page.

The homepage has tweaked graphics to make it appear cleaner, and you can toggle the shared status of a document or view its shared URL.

This page is also much faster than it used to be.

Sharing a document is now faster: it opens a window rather than reloading the page. This also makes viewing the share link quicker.

You can now preview as you edit, by clicking the preview button at the bottom of the page. You don’t need to save to preview, it loads instantly (rather than leaving the edit page.)

What’s next? We’re currently working on a few minor Internet Explorer glitches, and still ploughing away at the Helipad Mac GUI client.

Continue reading → | helipad, announcements

Kev (our sysadmin and morale officer) uses Helipad mobile in a unique way: he sets a tag’s page as his mobile browser’s homepage. This means he can quickly access documents suitable for his phone.

In his case he uses documents tagged with “gtd” so he can easily keep track of todo lists. I thought it might be useful to have an ”@mobile” tag for documents you generally want to see on the move.

We’re still working on the Helipad upgrade and Mac version, they’re almost ready! (Mac version needs serious testing to get synchronisation safe, upgrade needs more IE testing in Windows.)

Continue reading → | helipad, tips

Helipad has been receiving some serious development effort recently, with the following new features going through final testing:

• The Edit/Preview/Share buttons have been moved alongside the save button, and work dynamically (no page reloads)
• The themes are being enhanced to make things appear smoother
• Big performance improvements

These updates should go live within the next week.

Despite Helipad being a free application, I get a lot of pressure to work on it because all my friends use it! It currently has around 5,000 users, with several hundred using it every day. Not bad for something I developed by myself in a month!

I’m also still working on the Mac OS Helipad client that we announced last year. Because it’s a departure from Helicoid’s core focus (web applications), it’s taking longer to develop. I’m currently stuck trying to…

Continue reading → | helipad

I’ve been working on updating Basecamp Mobile to try and solve the login issues some users have reported.

• basecamp.helicoid.net is now running on a faster server
• I’ve updated legacy code and moved it to Rails 2
• The public code repository has been updated: http://code.helicoid.net/svn/applications/bcm/

Many thanks to “ash” for his helpful suggestions.

Continue reading → | basecamp, mobile | 3 comments

Tiktrac and Ebiwrite have recently surged in popularity thanks to generous coverage by excellent blogs (thanks 100shiki and Emily Chang!) Whenever this happens, the barrage of new users discover bugs lurking we weren’t able to catch with our tests. I’ve been working hard to keep on top of these, at pretty much all hours.

Here’s what we’ve fixed this month:

• Parts of Ebiwrite became unusable when people used tags with a period in them. We’ve temporarily prevented tags with ”.” from being created, but there’s a fix on the way that permits them (it requires more testing due to other dependancies). Thanks Futty!
• Under certain conditions Tiktrac imports created tasks with no user set, which caused problems viewing the associated time sheet. This is now fixed.
• Tiktrac imports also became unusable when importing CSV files with blank headers. Tiktrac now renames t…

Continue reading → | ebiwrite, tiktrac

Note: This tip actually applies to all of our web applications, seeing as we carefully craft mobile interfaces for each of them.

Did you know your Tiktrac account has a mobile phone version? Just add /mob to your account’s URL. Even though it provides a limited view on your account, it allows you to post tasks wherever you are with a mobile phone.

This is great for anyone who leaves the office regularly, like tradesmen. We have a plumber friend who uses his phone to log time when he’s out on a job , which means his time sheets are more accurate: no more end of week panics trying to remember what he worked on.

Similarly, Helipad allows you to read your documents when you’re away from the computer. Just login with your phone at http://pad.helicoid.net/mob. This saved me a lot of time when I was setting up Helicoid, because I …

Continue reading → | tips, helipad, ebiwrite, tiktrac

Since this blog covers our product announcements, we’ve decided to launch a new blog entitled Helicoid Insider, covering:

• Technical tips on building web applications
• Interface design, and design culture
• Web industry observations, opinions, discussion

Recent posts include:

• Start using Test Driven Development today
• 20 free icons dedicated to programmers
• 10 essential ruby gems

Continue reading → | announcements

Tiktrac, our time tracking app, has just been furnished with a Mac OS Dashboard widget.

To download the widget and get instructions on how to use it, visit the widget’s page.

We’d love to hear from you (and give you awesome free stuff) if you’ve used Tiktrac’s API to make any widgets, gadgets or interesting things. Also get in touch if you’d like help building something like this.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, tips

We recently updated the homepage for Tiktrac, our time sheets web application. While going over the copy we had an interesting idea: why not include a dynamic counter for the total time tracked?

So now you can see the total amount of time recorded by the Tiktrac community. It currently displays 22210 hours, which is almost 1000 days.

That’s a lot of work… maybe soon we’ll have to switch the counter to days instead of hours!

Continue reading → | tiktrac, thoughts, fun