Ebiwrite has now joined Deadline and Helipad on Helicoid ID, our single sign-on service.

About Helicoid ID

Helicoid ID allows you to maintain the same login details across all our apps. Changing your email address, name and password will be reflected across each application that supports it.

About Ebiwrite

Ebiwrite is a translator’s toolkit. It features user-created dictionaries and a friendly dual-pane editor.

There’s a new Tiktrac Dashboard widget out. Download it here: tiktrac.com/widgets

I’ve also put the code in my GitHub account: alexyoung/tiktrac-widget — if you’re a developer check it out in Dashcode.

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

Helicoid ID is our new account management mini app. Here are the basics:

• Sign in with your Helipad/Deadline account details — this is your Helicoid ID
• It shows you the Helicoid services that you currently use, and other available services
• It allows you to change your personal details across supported applications
• News and updates about apps will be displayed here
• It currently only supports Helipad and Deadline
• It will ease the transition of other services into our shared authentication system (Ebiwrite is next)
• It will host centralised billing for future paid versions of Helipad, Deadline (as well as Tiktrac and Ebiwrite)
• We’ll migrate the forum eventually as well

Here’s what it looks like:

Helipad Mac has been updated. This update makes it work better in Snow Leopard, and makes it sync when you press cmd-s. It’s a free download by the way!

Tiktrac’s Dashboard Widget has also been upgraded. This version fixes a few bugs:

• When creating tasks, the checkbox state will be saved correctly
• It now stops you from attempting to add multiple tasks in one go (this might be added in a future update though)
• I’m still working on odd timer glitches

We build and maintain Rails apps at Helicoid, and use Linux servers. By default Rails apps generate a lot of logging, even when logging is set to :warn. However, these logs are useful because they contain information that can help fix bugs, or ensure proper operation of long running or background processes.

It’s a good idea to take some time out to properly manage your log files. This post discusses two tools for this: logrotate and logcheck.

Logrotate

It’s worth taking some time to manage server logs. Most Linux distros install logrotate which gradually expire old files. You can set logrotate up to rotate your Rails app logs too. Have a look at the examples in /etc/logrotate.d/ and make one for each of your Rails apps. No more 100 MB log files!

Logcheck

Another great tool is logcheck. This runs through lists of regular expressions to report anything unusual. If you’re installing in Debian or Ubuntu, make sure you grab the logcheck-database to filter out some of the noise from popular daemons on your system.

Logcheck can be set to email you reports, so you should have some interesting reading every Monday morning after a weekend away from work email.

A similar tool is swatch

I’m working on a series of articles about deploying Rails apps. It’s based on things I’ve learned at Helicoid, and it’s called Agile Deployment. Read it over at my personal blog.

JsChat is an MIT-licensed JSON-based chat system with a nifty web interface:

People have called it an “open source Campfire”, but it’s not really meant to be a Campfire competitor. It’s actually a response to these questions:

• Can we make a chat system like IRC without the legacy and bloated protocol?
• Can it work naturally on the web, desktop and console?

The “Js” in JsChat refers to JSON rather than JavaScript. It’s very easy to build bots and clients. For more information, see the JsChat site and JsChat blog.

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
• Build stuff with the API
• Try our other products, which are all listed on our company’s web site: helicoid.net

Loom is our issue tracking system. It evolved from Bugtagger, which I created for internal use in 2006. Loom has a few nifty features: the bug report form automatically snoops browser and OS details (to help designers), and it has exception tracking for developers. You can sign up to try it for free right now.

But the future of Loom is open source. I’ve set up a private GitHub repo to prepare it for release. It will be MIT licensed, and easy to set up for use within your company. I’ll continue to develop the server-based “closed” version, but features will be pushed back into the open source edition. The only major difference will be that Loomapp.com will be integrated into Helicoid’s single sign-on system that Helipad and Deadline use.

If you’re interested in helping prepare Loom for the public, contact us and I’ll add you to the private GitHub repo. The repository will become public once we’ve verified it installs and runs on enough systems — we initially had Ruby 1.8.6 issues (it was my fault), which Ric Roberts helped me fix.

Loom is built with Ruby on Rails, but help from designers and writers would be awesome too! You’ll get fully credited of course!