Helipad is now available over secure connections with SSL. Just visit https://helipadapp.com. It’s worth adding to your bookmarks. All content is optionally served over SSL, including login and public pages. Remember this the next time you’re using public wifi and want to take notes with Helipad!

This is available to all customers for free. Just remember to visit/bookmark the correct URL, and not pad.helicoid.net.

Browser Support

You should see a lock icon in your browser. Most display it in the address bar, but newer versions of Safari show it in the top-right (it’s grey on grey so hard to see).

I’ve tested this in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE6, 7, 8. When we initially deployed one of our friends found a problem with Mac OS 10.5 Safari, but this is now fixed.

Helipad now a new look! The changes are focused on improving productivity and making the app feel faster. These design changes are a year in the making — after many false starts I feel like we’ve finally got it right.

The Changes

• There’s now a drop-down navigation menu
• The File menu has an Open item which can be used to find a document anywhere within the app
• The Open menu item has a text search which filters based on titles and tags
• The Open menu item also has fast sort options (click on the table headers)
• The Tag Cloud can be viewed on any page from the Search menu
• The dashboard page loads content using Ajax, which means the app will feel snappier when logging in
• Font sizes have been increased for tables
• Popup windows can be closed by pressing the escape key
• The Preview view now has the same horizontal size as edit, with its own scrollbar

Video

View a video of these new changes in action

Design Decisions

The original design had problems coping with the context-sensitive nature of Helipad — parts of the interface need certain buttons and options that other areas don’t need. Putting the tag cloud somewhere was also a problem — some users like having it open, but it adds too much visual noise for most of us.

Another problem was the tabs and header. Neither used space efficiently, and on some pages the document title was repeated 3 times: once in the browser title, then again in the header, then finally in the editor.

The interesting thing about Helipad is we’ve had the same basic design since 2006 — it scales well to major browsers (including legacy browsers like IE6). It’s also fast and simple. I wanted to keep these positive aspects of the original design.

I really like the design we came up with for Deadline, so I wanted the visual style to reflect this — big fonts, where the user’s content is king. However, this somehow didn’t work in Helipad:

The title bar was slightly opaque, so users could have their own background images like Twitter. When I actually implemented this design the interface became too noisy — what works for Twitter doesn’t actually make sense for a productivity app.

The major design change I kept from this experiment was the drop-down menu. It behaves like Windows and Mac OS menus — there are certain items that are context sensitive (like File > Delete). What’s useful about this is you don’t have to keep navigating back to the dashboard page to browse documents. It also allows us to put extra features like Export to HTML/PDF somewhere easily accessible.

After showing the resulting interface to colleagues and friends, I added refinements like CSS3 drop-shadow to make the menus clearer, and the Open dialog had a lot of changes to support searching and sorting. This is the result:

View a video

What’s Next?

The last few Helipad updates have been maintenance releases to make it easier for me to roll out planned upgrades. Now a more efficient interface is in place I can continue to improve the service more effectively.

I don’t like revealing new features in case implementing them turns out to be impossible, but I’m trying to replicate the folders feature implemented in the Mac and iPhone clients. Folders actually use tags — the clients just recognise folder:folder_name and act accordingly, so it’s possible to emulate this feature by clicking these tags in the web interface.

Helipad has been updated to include multiple tag search. If you visit /document/tags/tag1+tag2+tag3 it will display documents that match all of the tags.

The web interface needs to be updated to support folders, so while we’re doing this we’ll add an interface for multiple tag search as well.

I’ve also updated the Helipad API documentation to include notes on /document/all_ids and searching for documents changed since a date. These methods are used by our Mac and iPhone apps for efficient syncing.

Blogs

We recently merged the technical Helicoid Insider blog into this blog. I also updated it to use the Jekyll site generator, which makes it lightweight and easy to update. You can get the source code to our blog from my GitHub account: alexyoung/helicoid_blog.

This post is written by Yuka who designed Ebiwrite. Yuka discusses translating 37signals’ latest book, Rework, and reflects on the software used by the translation team. This post is also in Japanese.

Translators and dentists share a similarity. Both work ‘backstage’ and because our works are rarely seen by many, we are rarely appreciated. Dentists are even feared by many of their patients… so I suppose I’m glad at least we translators don’t get that. When I read on Twitter, reviews and blog posts about how well the book read, I feel proud that we did a great job.

Published under the title 『小さなチーム、大きな仕事』, it translates to “Small Team, Big Work: 37signals’ Formula for Success”. In the original American version, it’s “Rework”, but the Japanese publisher Hayakawa felt that was too negative for the Japanese market. It has proved quite popular so far (in part, thanks to all those tweets) and has twice been out of stock on AmazonJP.

Our team of four translators were given the original manuscript at the end of September. It took us until the end of January to edit and translate our way through the entire book. Ahead of the American date (9th March), our Japanese version has been out since 19th Feb.

Three of us, including me, used Ebiwrite for the laborious process – laborious because American English colloquials do not translate easily into Japanese, which famously has no slang. I also set up a shared dictionary (noted for ‘Rework’ use) so my co-translators wouldn’t stumble over the colloquials.

As written in the postscript (of the book), I was here in London, while one of my co-translators was in North America – a similar working condition to 37signals. Except they only have 2 continents. We had 3. So scraping some time when all of us would be online together, was a hard thing to do, what with all the time differences. We only managed a few times when one of us couldn’t sleep so had some overlap time with the others.

We also made a Google Group and used GoogleDocs. Indeed, only doable with a small team. The book itself was ‘co-translated’. In reality we each had a section to ourselves. Chapter by chapter, we mailed to GoogleGroups and as a team, tweaked it bit by bit. My understanding of the English culture and language, thanks to my nearly 15 years(total 20years) in the UK, is much better than my co-workers’. But because I left Japan aged 15, my Japanese is not as good as theirs. I feel very grateful that they made a lot of those sentences make more Japanese sense!

The fact you can coin a term fairly easily is an English peculiarity. Sadly Japanese is more rigid than that, so unless there was an already similar phrase in existence, we had to make do with an approximation. We avoided directly translating phrases as much as possible with only one exception. To say ‘perishable’ when it isn’t about food in Japanese doesn’t sound right. Somehow my approximation of ‘best before date’ was apparently easily understandable. At least, the reviews are all very favourable so far.

Helipad iPhone version 1.6 has been submitted to the App Store. This version includes the following new features and fixes:

• Add a new document to a folder
• Share editor now appears properly from within folders
• You can now delete folders: either just delete the folder or all the associated documents
• Rename folders when viewing the documents in a folder
• The full document list no longer includes documents that have been placed within a folder

Helipad Mac has a new update out, which includes a tag cloud, drag and drop for folders, and a line height adjustment option in the Appearance preferences.

Full List of Changes

• Drag and drop documents into different folders
• Option in Appearance Preferences for drag and drop: set it to copy or move a document between folders
• Folders window shows currently selected document name
• Appearance preferences now has line height
• Added tag cloud (go to the View menu, then select Show Tag Cloud)

Helipad Mac now has folders and full screen support.

To edit folders, select a document then press the Folders button. Add a folder, double-click it to rename, them click the checkbox to add the document to the folder.

Folders can be renamed and deleted.

Full screen view is available in the Window menu or by pressing cmd-shift-F. Press cmd-shift-F to exit full screen.

Helipad Mac has been updated. This version makes the following changes:

• Added automatic app updates
• Documents can now be sorted by the last edited date (go to Preferences, Appearance to change the sort setting)
• Fixed a bug where pressing Undo moved the scrollbar

Download

Riot is a unit testing library that I’ve been using on a few new Helicoid products/features, and some of my open source projects. It has incredibly concise syntax, and I liked it so much that I wrote a JavaScript version.

Read my overview of Riot here and download my JavaScript version on github.com/alexyoung/riotjs.

I’ve been working on improving the Deadline Jabber bot. We had some architectural problems with it that needed fixing, but it’s been solid for a few weeks now so I though it was time for an update.

Editing Deadlines

Jabber now supports deadline editing:

• set due id my due date — set the due date for a deadline
• set description id my description — set the description

For example:

set due 39147 next week
set due 39147 19:30
set description 39147 defeat Zod

Time Zones

You can now set and view your time zone. This is really handy if you go on holiday and only have access to the Jabber interface. It works like this:

• time — view your time and zone
• set zone city — set the time zone to the “city”

At the moment there’s no way to view or search the cities we support — it uses the same list as appears on the settings page on the web site.

For example:

set zone London
set zone Paris