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

Continue reading → | deadline, jabber

Deadline now has keyboard shortcuts! I designed them a little bit like Gmail and Google Reader, so they should be familiar to most of you.

They need to be turned on to work:

1. Click Settings underneath the Deadline logo
2. Click the Appearance tab
3. Click the checkbox and press Apply

Here’s the page you should see with the option:

There’s a new panel in Help with all the shortcuts:

1. j/k move up and down the deadline list
2. y marks as done
3. Return selects the date field
4. Tab moves to the description field
5. Esc cancels editing

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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

Continue reading → | deadline, helipad

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

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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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…

Continue reading → | deadline, sms, announcements

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:

...

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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.

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We’ve just updated Deadline with these fixes/improvements:

• Calendar feeds that don’t need HTTP auth are now available for those of you who want to subscribe to Deadline in Google Calendar
• Reminders are now switched off/on properly (thanks debaire)
• Fixed parsing of phrases like “hunt rabbit 3am tomorrow” (thanks voamash)

These issues have been acknowledged but not fixed yet:

• Phrases containing “today” aren’t interpreted 100% correctly yet
• Jabber bot isn’t working across Google Talk to Jabber. We’re testing our own Jabber server, and it may be that we have to run a service for Google Talk and Jabber separately—thanks to dag for helping us with this

These are things we’ve been asked about a lot this week:

• We’re looking into the costs for SMS alerts and international support
• Time zone support quality is being looked into
• We are indeed building a Mac and iPhone application (Helipad iPhone will be out first)
• If anyone builds a cool and user-friendly *A…

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The Deadline API is now live:

Deadline API documentation

A lot of people were asking for it, so we prioritised releasing it this week. We want to run a competition for the best apps people write with it, so stay tuned for details on that soon.

Continue reading → | api, deadline, announcements

Deadline is our latest app: a new take on the web calendar. It uses natural language parsing to interpret events you write in plain English. Searching is also intelligent: typing “next week” shows all your events for next week, whereas “meet kev” will look for those keywords.

Deadline works with Jabber/Gtalk: it sends reminders and also allows you to delete, delay and hide events through your IM client.

It also accepts and sends email. That means if your mobile phone supports email or MMS you can get and set reminders anywhere. There’s also a mobile interface too just like the rest of Helicoid’s projects.

If it can’t understand the date and time you’ve typed in, it’ll prompt you to enter one with a form like this:

Deadline is the second application to use Helicoid auth server, which means if you have…

Continue reading → | announcements, deadline | 2 comments