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
• Bui…

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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 …

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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

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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

1. Download and unzip DeadlineGrowl
2. Double click DeadlineGrowl to run it
3. Enter your email address and password
4. 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

Continue reading → | deadline, mac

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:

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

Example:

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

Continue reading → | deadline, github

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.

Continue reading → | helipad, mac, beta

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).

Continue reading → | tiktrac, upgrades

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

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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:

• Read about the awesome Helipad ruby gem
• Add ShareThis buttons to your Tumblr account
• Get Exception logging in Loom

We’ve also started Quite Useful, a blog about useful tech-related tip…

Continue reading → | helipad

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.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, widgets

Our server hosting company are performing maintenance next week. They’re moving our servers, which means they’ll definitely be offline for a few minutes. Here’s the information they sent us:

Date of Work: 17th – 18th February 2009
Maintenance Window: 19:00 through 04:00
Outage per Host: Up to two hours, likely 30 minutes

We apologise for any inconvenience this might cause, and we will backup your data externally to ensure it’s safe. This is the first outage we’ve had from Bytemark Hosting for 3 years, the last (30 second) outage we had was where we prepared for this downtime.

Continue reading → | maintenance, announcements

The Helipad iPhone app is out now: App Store link

It’s available for £2.99—and of course the web app is still free to use with no advertising. Helipad iPhone syncs your notes to your iPhone so you can access them offline. Create, delete and edit notes straight from the iPhone.

After speaking to our first customer, he had this to say:

“Damn, this is slick!”

So check it out!

Continue reading → | helipad, iphone

Helipad Mac is now available to everyone. It’s a Mac OS Helipad client that syncs all your notes to your computer. This means you can write notes offline then sync them up the next time you’re online. Note that this is a time limited trial and will be upgraded in April.

Note if you’re on the private beta

We’ve changed the data structures slightly. Before downloading and running the new Helipad Mac client, sync your notes and then delete the old data file: Library/Application Support/HelipadTest2/HelipadTest2.xml. You can delete it with either Finder or the terminal.

This will all be made transparent before the final release, along with automated upgrades.

Continue reading → | helipad, mac, announcements

We’ve got server maintenance planned on Sunday 8th February: add it to your Deadline account! It’s likely that all our web applications will be down for a few minutes while this happens.

We post about service outages here: status.helicoid.net. We also post on Twitter about service interruptions: twitter.com/helicoid.

Continue reading → | upgrades

Deadline has been updated with some interface tweaks:

• A balloon will pop up as you hover over dates to show more text
• The background image is now fixed
• There’s now an option in Appearance/Settings that will let you turn off the hover fading effect

The date details balloon looks like this:

It shows you the day name and time until the event. If you’ve specified a time for your event it’ll display the time as well.

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Deadline now supports SMS (text messages). The feature is currently available as a trial while we estimate costs. To get on the trial, see the SMS page in Deadline Settings for more details.

Notes on Deadline’s SMS support

• The trial is free, but SMS support will be a paid feature in the future. This is because sending an SMS costs money and Deadline is currently a free service. We may subsidise SMS using context-sensitive adverts in the future.
• Two-way SMS may be available in the future, we’re still looking into costs and international support issues.
• You’re currently limited to 10 messages a day. This number may change depending on popularity and costs.

Other improvements in this upgrade

• Deadline now supports Fluid
• Deadline now supports Mozilla Ubiquity
• Setting “Remember me” during login should always work now
• The settings page has been tidied up, with some sec…

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The Deadline colours update has just gone live! This update adds:

• Configuration options for colours and background images in Settings, Appearance
• Almost all of the colours in Deadline’s interface can be controlled: background, buttons, navigation (footer), highlight hover, “odd” rows, search bar border
• A generous helping of our own preset themes to get you started
• Background images can also be uploaded and tiled if required
• We’ve also added a print stylesheet
• Fixes for date parsing when descriptions contain numbers

The preset themes come from my own designs and photo collection. Here’s the current set:

The Appearance settings look like this:

...

Continue reading → | deadline, announcements

Deadline has been upgraded:

• Support for recurring reminders has been added with documentation in the Help section
• The last email reminder can now be set as “important” (this should show up in Gmail, Outlook, Apple’s Mail and Thunderbird)

Writing recurring events that Deadline can understand

Write a date with the word “every” to denote a recurring event. Once the deadline’s date has been reached it will be automatically rescheduled.

For example:

• Alex’s birthday every January 21st
• Art lesson every Monday morning
• English lesson every 4pm

Recurring reminders are indicated with an icon:

Currently there’s no way to manually set an event as recurring.

Continue reading → | deadline, announcements

This week we’ve made the following fixes to Deadline:

• Google Calendar will now show text instead of just “busy”
• Time zone bugs have been resolved (sometimes typing “tonight” resulted in a date for tomorrow)
• Internet Explorer 6 and Chrome support improved
• Selecting “——-” as a date in the full date entry form returned XML instead of a friendly error

If Google Calendar still says busy for all of your Deadline events:

1. Remove the calendar
2. Go to Deadline and copy the link to the iCal feed from the Settings page
3. Paste in the calendar link, but add ”?999” to the end of the link

The reason you need to add ?999 is a random number will fool Google into thinking it’s a different URL and thus download the new version instead of using a cached copy.

Your URL should look something like this:

http://deadlineapp.com/exports/YOUR_ID/YOUR_CODE/file.ics?999

Continue reading → | deadline, tips | 4 comments

Later this week we’ll be updating Deadline with the following upgrades:

• New reminder system – this will reduce server load and allow us to add some clever new features
• Reminder previews – when editing your reminder settings you’ll be able to view a table of reminders to easily see what the settings do
• Additional reminders (minutes) – you’ll be able to set days, hours and minutes for additional reminders (thanks jrk)
• Jabber bot – the IM bot will work properly with Jabber (it’ll have a new account name)
• More date parsing improvements (especially for phrases including the word “today”) (thanks Dougal)

These updates are still being tested but we’ll let you know when they’re deployed.

Update: We’ve just deployed these changes to our servers. Note that you should switch to using talk@deadlineapp.com for IM.

Continue reading → | deadline