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

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

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 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