Do you ever wish you could quickly write a note, to-do list, or organise a bunch of ideas on your computer… but access them anywhere? Do you find uploading documents to web sites annoying, and just want to write?

If so, you’ll love Helipad. This is our latest project, designed to be the perfect web-based companion to your tattered and beloved notepad.

Helipad is an online notepad. It has several features that make it unique:

• Notes can be organised with tags, and you can give tags colours to easily find them
• There’s an unobtrusive auto-save that helps protect you from computer and browser crashes
• You can read and write notes on your phone with your phone’s web browser
• There’s an API, so developers can use their applications with it
• There’s an add-on API, so developers can create themes and plugins

Helipad lets you customise it to the extreme. It really is your own. You can radically change the interface, or add your own features.

Coloured …

Continue reading → | helipad, announcements

If you’ve read my previous posts on Helipad you’ll know it was created by me, to solve a particular need I had: the fusion between my personal notepad and the web.

It seems as if this was a relatively controversial thing to do: literally thousands of people are talking about Helipad. They’re comparing it to other services, pointing out the differences, wondering what people will do with the add-on system and other interesting discussions.

The upshot is, we’ve had almost 2000 signups in a week, which means Helipad is more popular than any other Helicoid application. And, many of the people who have signed up have provided feedback through our bug reporting system or by getting in touch with our contact form. Feedback is very important to us, so to all you who have emailed suggestions, ideas, bug reports and questions: thanks! We appreciate all your help. We endeavour to answer all your queries personally, even if it means …

Continue reading → | helipad, thoughts

If you read our mobile weblog, you might have noticed me talking about the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices. I was thinking about Helipad while I was writing this, and since so many of you seem to love using Helipad’s mobile interface, I’ve updated it.

I’ve added a search as soon as you login, so you can quickly get to what you want. If the search matches one pad or title, it’ll bring that document up. If it finds more, you’ll see them in a list.

We’ve also spent some time improving usability and ironing out minor problems and inconsistencies. Incidentally, we go through all server logs regularly, so any bugs that aren’t reported still get picked up. This has enabled me to figure out some rare bugs a few of you were running into.

And here’s an anecdote for you: some clever fellows have figured out that you can actually create accounts on Bugtagger, even though we hav…

Continue reading → | helipad, announcements

Helipad now allows you to export your documents. You can export one big XML file, containing the text along with the tags and other information, or a zip file containing exported documents as text files.

Here’s an image that illustrates the process:

To use this feature, select ‘your account’ and look for ‘Export your documents’ at the bottom of the page.

You could use this to export your notes and work on them offline in your favourite text editor!

Continue reading → | helipad