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 can quickly email Deadline wherever you are.

Jabber/Gtalk

I’ve recently been working on making the Deadline Jabber/Gtalk bots respond faster, and they’re working better than ever now. You can add talk@deadlineapp.com or deadline@helicoid.net (for Google Hosted Gtalk) to your buddy lists to talk to Deadline. It’ll send you reminders and also let you schedule and search them.

Fluid

Deadline is designed to work with Fluid. For more information on using site-specific browsers with Deadline, visit deadlineapp.com/ssb

Mozilla Ubiquity

If you’re a fan of Ubiquity, check out our Deadline Ubiquity scripts. This allows you to schedule and search reminders from within Firefox.

API

Deadline also has an XML API so you can make your own applications with it. I’m currently building an iPhone app that uses it.

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

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

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"

This will send you a notification that reads: “Alert, web server 1 is down”.

GitHub Support

You can link a GitHub project to Deadline using GitHub’s Post-Receive Hooks. This could be really useful for tracking changes to projects by co-workers when you’re out of the office (especially if you have SMS set up).

1. Edit one of your GitHub repositories
2. Click Service Hooks in the secondary navigation
3. Go to Settings, Feeds/iCal in Deadline
4. Copy the GitHub Hook URL
5. Paste it into GitHub’s Post-Receive URLs list and press Update Settings

You will now receive notifications when people push changes to the repository.

We use Secure Trading for Helicoid’s payment processing. I wrote a payment processor plugin for our apps about two years ago, and it’s been in production since then. A few people have asked me to open source the code, so here it is: securetrading-rails.

I’d like to integrate it with ActiveMerchant because I like their API, but I haven’t had time so far.

Out of all the payment processing companies I’ve dealt with, which is a lot, Secure Trading have been the most reliable with the best customer service. Their XML API is relatively straightforward too.

The Helipad Mac beta has been extended. Download it here: Helipad Mac.

This will run until August. We’re working on adding Sparkle for automatic updates so upgrading will be easier soon.

Tiktrac’s times are now internally stored in seconds. This means the timer is much more intuitive. We also took this opportunity to make the timer look more like a clock:

The task entry form now displays the end date when you set the task as completed, which saves a few seconds when inputting lots of tasks.

We’ve also made the currently selected sheet clearer in the right-hand navigation.

There’s also a new manage screen which allows you to add or configure clients and sheets — administrators will see a Manage tab at the top of each page. I decided to add this page because we want to remove the right-hand sheet navigation to replace it with something that uses less space in the future.

The seconds upgrade was actually a difficult thing to do, but it’s resulted in cleaner code internally. That frees us up to implement new features soon (upgraded dashboard, navigation and invoicing).

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

We rolled out a few minor changes to Helipad this week:

• Tags on the dashboard page can be hidden
• The space usage indicator has been removed
• Helipad can now be reached at helipadapp.com

We decided to drop the space limitation because we’re now selling Helipad iPhone.

Coming soon

• Tiktrac will be moving from minutes to seconds internally, this means the timers will be more intuitive
• We’re also working on a configurable dashboard for Tiktrac
• Deadline iPhone is in development
• Deadline SMS will continue to be free for a while because the SMS traffic is relatively low, so try it while it’s free!

We’ve recently added exception logging to Loom. There’s an open source rails plugin which you can use to integrate Loom with your Rails apps. The API is simple so we’ll probably collect plugins and libraries for other platforms (I’ll look into iPhone support for iPhone apps).

If you haven’t seen it before, Loom is a tiny app we built to track bugs in our apps. It also works well as a customer support tool. It originally started off as Bugtagger in 2006, and it had some work towards remote exception logging but this was never finished. Bugtagger was a quick app I built to support Tiktrac customer support in the early days.

So now remote exception logging is almost ready for the public. You can check out the plugin and integrate it with your apps by adding your Loom account details to a controller. The README on Github has more details. The code looks like this:

  enable_loom :email => 'alex@example.com',
              :password => 'test',
              :url => 'http://yoursubdomain.loomapp.com',
              :project_id => 1

There’s a lot of work to do to make this a truly useful tool, but I have a feeling closely integrating bug reports with support requests and logged exceptions could lead to something incredibly useful.