The Korg DS-10 is an incredible piece of software: it’s a sequencer and synth based on the Korg MS-10, allowing you to make music on your Nintendo DS.

There’s excellent coverage of it in this week’s 1up show, including interviews and jam sessions with the developers.

Helipad’s API has been updated to improve the way it handles tags. The changes are backwards compatible so old code should still work. Read more in the Helipad API guide

Incidentally, we recently received a few questions about Helipad in our support chat room.

Q: If two people are collaborating on a document, there is no change tracking, right?

There’s currently no change tracking. Ebiwrite, a similar product produced by us, includes this and we may port it to Helipad in the future.

Q: Is there any way to get RSS or email updates?

If we do decide to implement change tracking in the future we’d add this, at the moment you’re probably better served by using the API.

We’re in our support chat room UK office hours (check the time in GMT). We sometimes hang out there after hours as well, so if you wait around you might find us. I’m there (the developer of Helicoid’s apps), and Kev is too (who looks after servers.)

Big Ideas: Don’t get any is an incredible remix of Radiohead’s Nude, using a collection of old hardware bent and twisted to reproduce the original. Featuring a ZX Spectrum and harddisk speaker!

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Sick of your desktop wallpaper? Scrap it and try one of these designs! These wonderful illustrations were commissioned by us and produced by Craig Humpston (also known online as ging_inferior). Craig’s an artist and VJ based in Nottingham, England.

Look how awesome they look on a real desktop:

If you’d like to get in touch with Craig about his work, please contact him at: ging_inferior@hotmail.co.uk.

If you’re an artist, illustrator or designer and you’d like to contact us about commissions or working on any of our web applications, please use our contact form! We pay well and if you’re based around London we’ll be sure to buy you a few beers too!

From the BBC’s article, Code centre ‘in financial crisis’:

Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust, said: "The site is unique and one of the most important remaining from World War II.
“We have exciting plans to develop the park and save it for future generations. The more visitors we have helps us to realise these plans.”

As a British software developer I find this saddening, since stories of the efforts at Bletchley Park (partly due to Neal Stephenson’s depiction in Cryptonomicon) are partly what inspired me to get into programming.

Perhaps I’ll organise a big Helicoid visit to help!

Rowland Watkins, an old university friend of mine (and a friend of all the staff at Helicoid), recently wrote up a comparison of the Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services. He’s specialised in grid and more general distributed computing for about 8 years now, so his comments on the topic have some pedigree.

Since we specialise in Rails, leveraging the power of Amazon Web Services has always seemed more natural than Google’s approach which currently relies on Python. Here’s what Rowland has to say on the matter:

The clear separation of duty in AWS is what gives it the edge over Google App Engine. EC2 allows businesses to deploy complete OS images from S3 to produce novel environments such as Morph. It gives business more control on how to put together business processes which currently isn’t possible with the Google App Engine.

It was announced today that Google are now allowing hosting of JavaScript libraries from their servers, which has direct benefit for businesses like Helicoid and our customers. Perhaps in the future we’ll enjoy a cloud of cloud-like services?

PingMag MAKE features interviews with entrepreneurs and craftsman in Japan. Some of them are people who have taken over an ancient family business and are dealing with business challenges presented by modern culture and economics. Others are people who have resurrected an old craft, to find a niche space in the market today.

These interviews are literally a gold mine of ideas for designers, entrepreneurs or even programmers like me! In the most recent interview, Kiri Woodcraft with a Modern Vision, Katsunari Matsuda reveals how he gets inspiration for his products:

In my case, I get hit when I first open my eyes in the morning. When I wake up, and I’m just sitting there staring into space and thinking, an image will come to me and take shape.

And a great story for dealing with unhappy customers:

One time, we received a complaint from a customer who had bought one of our rice storage bins. It was after the three year warranty period had expired, so the staff weren’t sure how to deal with the complaint. [..] When it arrived, we could see that it had a lot of wear, and we wouldn’t be able to repair it, so we sent a new one in replacement, and they were really pleased. We got a letter of thanks from the son, the daughter, and the mother, and that made us really happy.

It’s heartening to read about these people innovating their craft in the face of outsourcing and cheaper foreign production, and it’s given me great ideas for my own company.

We’ll be performing server maintenance this weekend which may cause service interruptions for our applications. Read more on our status page.

Also, we recently fixed a bug on the Ebiwrite signup page which could cause problems when registering. If you couldn’t register you should be able to now.

Even though we use Helipad for our notes and to-do lists, I still think you can’t beat a good paper notebook. It’s hard to hunt down something unique, but we recently found Unfinished and Unpublished — a limited-edition collection of very special notebooks created by a collaboration between StudioMatador and several international artists and designers. The Isis&Pluto cover is particularly inspired.

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.