After a long process sourcing inspiration and pouring ideas into my sketchbook, I finally finished deploying updates to all of our public-facing websites and support sites. We wanted to improve the customer experience beyond our web apps, so if you’re looking for support resources or information relating to our company and services it’ll be much easier. This means helicoid.net, support.helicoid.net, status.helicoid.net, forums.helicoid.net and our blogs have all been redesigned! (phew!)

The new designs work in modern browsers and even IE6. I also tested it on the PlayStation 3, and it looks great on big TVs!

I’ve also released search.helicoid.net, which lets you search Helicoid’s content. This is linked to from our error page…

Continue reading → | design, announcements, helicoid

We’ve recently pooled out support resources into one place, with the launch of our support page available here:

support.helicoid.net

This contains details on all the ways you can get in touch with us, including:

• Web chat and IRC (irc.helicoid.net)
• Twitter
• Contact form and phone
• Forum
• Service status page

We’ll be evolving our support site over time as we roll out new services in the near future. Note that we’re available for chat and on the phone during office hours (GMT), weekdays.

Continue reading → | announcements, support

Loom, our issue tracker, is now out for beta testing. It’s an evolution of Bugtagger, which we’ve been using internally for 2 years but never released publicly.

Features include:

• Simple, extensible design: everyone from programmers to plumbers should be able to use it
• Public forms: so if you market a product or service you can collect support requests without requiring users to have accounts on Loom
• Email integration and messages: customers can send email messages to issues
• Attachments: Attach files to issues
• Search, tags, project organisation, RSS, mobile phone support: All the usual features you’d expect form us!
• XML REST API: We’re planning on using Loom to collect support requests via our contact form, what will you use the API for?

Loom Beta accounts are free and pretty much unrestricted. Price plans on launch will…

Continue reading → | loom, announcements

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.

Continue reading → | announcements

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

Since this blog covers our product announcements, we’ve decided to launch a new blog entitled Helicoid Insider, covering:

• Technical tips on building web applications
• Interface design, and design culture
• Web industry observations, opinions, discussion

Recent posts include:

• Start using Test Driven Development today
• 20 free icons dedicated to programmers
• 10 essential ruby gems

Continue reading → | announcements

Tiktrac’s now got a referral scheme. If you get 10 friends to sign up, you’ll receive 50% off the Standard or Premium accounts for a year!

All you need to do is get your referral URL and hand it out to friends, or even stick it on your blog. You can find your referral URL by logging in, clicking on Tiktrac settings and then Referrals.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements, tips

We’re proud to announce that Ebiwrite, a web application dedicated to translators, has been launched today!

Background and design

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Yuka Mizuno and I’m Helicoid’s copywriter (I also help run the business-side of things). After working on several long translations last year, I wished for a web application created purely for translators.

One of the biggest annoyances I have with translation is constantly looking backwards and forwards between my source text and translation. On a computer this means flicking between windows or tabs, quickly ending up either fed up or with RSI. So I insisted my future husband (Alex, the designer and programmer of Helicoid’s applications) built translators a program that would resolve these issues.

The most basic problem, flipping between source text and translation, could easily be solved by splitting a text editor up into two panels. Alex created a prototype (using “Helip…

Continue reading → | ebiwrite, announcements

We are pleased to announce that Tiktrac has finished its beta trial.

Beta testers have all been granted two months on the premium price plan (this includes 1000 sheets, branding features and secure access over SSL.)

Tiktrac’s launch also sees the release of a refreshed interface detailed below.

New features

• Click to edit tasks – click once to get the full task editor in a pop-up!
• Quickly delete tasks – click the trash can icon to remove a task without leaving a sheet
• You can now create targets for sheets, allowing you to easily see your progress for the month – a feature contractors and agencies will appreciate!
• Tasks now look the same everywhere, and are editable everywhere too
• Time-zone are now supported
• A new contextual help system providing concise help and tips – great for new users and your clients

Targets

The new targets features is especially useful for contractors and agencies. You can quickly see how close yo…

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac

We’ve been working on making Tiktrac “live” since April. During this time, we’ve held off updates while we’ve gone through the process of setting up our billing system.

This took slightly longer than we anticipated, but fortunately we’ve been able put a lot of effort into Tiktrac during this time.

Before the end of the month, we’ll be deploying:

• Time zone support
• Monthly “targets”—something contractors will appreciate
• SSL—Tiktrac will work over secure connections
• A more consistent, dynamic and refined interface
• Interface and usability tweaks for every feature
• Inline help:
• Bug fixes to improve reliability and speed
• 100% test code coverage—all of our code is now covered by tests

Payments

• Payments for Tiktrac will be made with credit card
• You will be billed monthly
• We will calculate tax where companies are based in the UK and EU, else you are expect…

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac

As part of our customer service strategy, we’ve just set up our service status page

It’s hosted away from our applications (in the US instead of the UK), so chances are it will be up in the event of any connectivity issues with our main servers.

If you rely on Tiktrac or Helipad, why not bookmark it?

Continue reading → | announcements

I was sitting at my desk in my dressing gown this morning, wrestling with Tiktrac’s deployment scripts to get them as seamless as possible, to the dramatic sounds of Muse’s latest album. Of course, I broke things, but after a few coffees everything is now better than ever!

I had a reason to get up early and start work while Tiktrac’s usage is low: we’ve added a new custom branding interface and cleaned up the settings area:

This means you can now select your own colours for Tiktrac and upload a logo. But wait! It’s more awesome that mere colour selection! It also generates gradients to soften the blow of most corporate colour schemes.

To try it out, navigate to ‘tiktrac settings’. The link’s at the top right of any page. Then select ‘appearance’. Play around with the colour sliders, then save and your changes will be visible:

The logos will appear in your header, so it’s bes…

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements

Some of you reported issues with the task timer in Tiktrac. I’ve been working on getting this right for the last month, and along the way we’ve made quite a few improvements to Tiktrac:

• The play/pause timer buttons work the same way as iTunes
• The dynamic elements of the interface (including the timers) have been fully tested in Opera 9, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2 and Safari 2 (please blame Kev or Yuka if we’ve missed anything)
• Visual cues have been added when the timers are started and stopped:

• Visual cues have also been added when a task is completed:

• Buttons that change ‘views’ automatically retain their setting:

• The reports section looks slightly more awesome
• The graphs on the reports section are now white so they’re now more printer-fr…

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements

If you read our mobile weblog, you might have noticed me talking about the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices. I was thinking about Helipad while I was writing this, and since so many of you seem to love using Helipad’s mobile interface, I’ve updated it.

I’ve added a search as soon as you login, so you can quickly get to what you want. If the search matches one pad or title, it’ll bring that document up. If it finds more, you’ll see them in a list.

We’ve also spent some time improving usability and ironing out minor problems and inconsistencies. Incidentally, we go through all server logs regularly, so any bugs that aren’t reported still get picked up. This has enabled me to figure out some rare bugs a few of you were running into.

And here’s an anecdote for you: some clever fellows have figured out that you can actually create accounts on Bugtagger, even though we hav…

Continue reading → | helipad, announcements

Do you ever wish you could quickly write a note, to-do list, or organise a bunch of ideas on your computer… but access them anywhere? Do you find uploading documents to web sites annoying, and just want to write?

If so, you’ll love Helipad. This is our latest project, designed to be the perfect web-based companion to your tattered and beloved notepad.

Helipad is an online notepad. It has several features that make it unique:

• Notes can be organised with tags, and you can give tags colours to easily find them
• There’s an unobtrusive auto-save that helps protect you from computer and browser crashes
• You can read and write notes on your phone with your phone’s web browser
• There’s an API, so developers can use their applications with it
• There’s an add-on API, so developers can create themes and plugins

Helipad lets you customise it to the extreme. It really is your own. You can radically change the interface, or add your own features.

Coloured …

Continue reading → | helipad, announcements

I hate to be a tease, so I promise this is the last teaser screenshot of our new product:

The product is Helipad, and it was inspired by my love of these little things:

A hardy notepad can go everywhere with you, can you can customise it beyond belief. People come up with their own annotation and organisation systems, with complete freedom to change their mind at any time.

I’ve tried using a few web-based personal organisers systems over the last few years, but I always end up ditching my laptop and using the humble notepad. However, I constantly feel as if I need a digital cousin for my paper tools—something that would let me write notes, to-do lists and categorise them with my own tagging schemes.

Helipad lets me do all of this and more: I can view notes on my phone with the mobile version, download notes using the API to work offline—I can even integrate my existing software with it! It even lets me colour tags (obviously I set the “important” tag to red!), and g…

Continue reading → | announcements, helipad

I’ve just finished deploying and testing the new features for Tiktrac that I’ve been working on over the last two weeks:

• It’s now possible to view all tasks for a sheet, or use the traditional monthly view.
• Task descriptions now accept textile, so you can format your descriptions with simple markup.
• Several fixes for IE6.

Here’s a screenshot of how the new sheet view looks:

The view change has actually simplified the Tiktrac’s internal code dramatically—this was a good chance for me to refactor things. The upshot of this for you is that it’s now much easier for me to add other views to the sheets page, so get in touch if you have any ideas!

Incidentally, the screenshot was taken in Linux, because we like to test our products in Linux, Mac OS and Windows.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements

Take a look at this screenshot from a new application I’m building:

This is a pet project of mine, started two weeks ago. It combines some of the technology we implemented in Multitap and Ebiwrite to produce something pretty unique. And no, it’s not another to-do list app!

Like all our projects, it has an API, mobile support and an element of fun. Unlike our other projects, which are aimed at small businesses, this one is aimed squarely at you!

If you want to get in on my little secret, contact us. The software has left my London apartment and landed on our servers—I’ve been using it every day since I initially created it. There’s a few important things missing yet, however!

Continue reading → | announcements, helipad

I’ve just added Basecamp Mobile to our public subversion repository. Since this is a fun side project for me, you may notice the current release is a little bit rough, eccentric, super-ninja-alpha, or in that space between being usable and needing a lot of work.

You can download it or browse the subversion repository, and then install it on your own server.

Read the README, and give me some pointers if you’re into ruby, rails or xhtml mp. Thanks, and enjoy Basecamp Mobile!

Continue reading → | announcements, code, basecamp, mobile

Over the last three months I’ve been working with a translator to produce a unique new product. The translator in question found that she wanted to keep her documents online, so she can easily access them and edit them anywhere. She also wanted to be able to see the original source text alongside her translation. Flipping back and forth between documents, printing things out, and general mucking about made her yearn for an application built just for translators.

We’ve taken the concept from an idea, to paper prototypes and now a working prototype. Amazingly, this prototype has only taken 3 weeks to design and code (all developed by me), and it’s now ready for our translator to play with.

Technically, the project is interesting: we’ve used a JavaScript model of the document within the browser, combined with Ajax to provide all the features you’d expect in an editor: keyboard shortcuts for quickly saving documents and auto-save….

Continue reading → | ebiwrite, announcements

Tiktrac and Bugtagger have moved to a new data center this weekend. You should be able to start accessing Tiktrac as usual by the end of today, but it may take up to 48 hours for some people.

The good news is: once things have moved over, they should be much faster and more reliable!

Let us know if you have any problems with your account after the migration.

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac, bugtagger

Tiktrac’s servers are currently inaccessible due to problems with our web hosting providers.

This is a strange coincidence, because we’re also migrating to a NEW server set up this weekend.

If you’re trying to access Tiktrac right now it may or may not be accessible, but our hosting providers have assured us that full service should resume within a few hours.

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac

I’ve been playing with Basecamp Mobile for about a week now, so I think it’s ready for people to play with:

http://basecamp.helicoid.net

It provides a basic interface to your Basecamp account, suitable for mobile phones.  It uses the XHTML Mobile Profile (for more on this, see my post, What is the XHTML Mobile Profile?)

Of course, it provides limited access to your account.  However, it’s built as a Rails application, and I’ll release the source code within a few weeks. This will allow you, or perhaps a colleague with the right skills, to install (and extend) it on your own server.  Before releasing it, a few friends are helping me improve it to make it suitable for public release.

Why did I build this? I thought being able to use Basecamp with my phone would be handy when I’m away from the office. I also wanted some experience working with the Basecamp API. ...

Continue reading → | code, announcements, rails, basecamp, mobile

We’re putting the finishing touches to Bugtagger, our bug reporting software. There’s still some way to go, but we’re already using it to track bugs in our own projects, so there’s not long to go now!

Who is it for?

Bugtagger is aimed at developers who want to allow customers to report issues and bugs.

There are several ways to integrate your projects with Bugtagger.

Project integration

You can integrate Bugtagger into your applications through the Bugtagger API, or Bugtagger’s bug reporting form. Each project you add to Bugtagger can have a form, and it gives you a unique and easy to remember URL for each one.

The form looks like this:

As you can see, there is a dynamic slider and tag entry field. These are designed to help your clients feel less constrained with technical details and able to accurately express what the problem they’ve found is.

The Technical notes field contains text generated by our JavaScript API …

Continue reading → | bugtagger, announcements

Multitap.net has been upgraded. New features include:

• More RSS feeds: latest comments, comments for a screenshot, latest posted per-user
• Users can no-longer vote up their own screenshots
• Improved tag cloud rendering
• Added a search form
• Added ‘remember me’ to the login form keep you logged in when you close your browser

Thanks to Gearbox for his astute observations!

A note for developers: the API has also been added in this release. It currently allows you to submit screenshots and fetch them. We’re going to add more functionality in the future, but we felt posting screenshots was the killer feature to get right.

We’re working on the documentation for the API, but if you can understand Ruby, this will clue you in:

require ‘xmlrpc/client’
require ‘base64’

server = XMLRPC::Client.new2(“http://multitap.net/backend/Screenshot”)
image_data = Base64.encode64(File.new(“C:/t…

Continue reading → | multitap, announcements

We’ve just upgraded Tiktrac! New features include:

Improved dashboard page: quickly add a task, interface improvements, overview of your account’s statistics
Added user administration shortcuts to the client edit page to help make administration easier

This release has many internal changes to improve performance, so please let us know if you find any problems.

And you can always post suggestions to our forums, and discuss Tiktrac with other people:

http://forums.helicoid.net/

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac

We’re currently finishing off some improvements to Tiktrac, our timesheets software. These updates are really just internal improvements, to make way for future changes.

When we publish the changes, you’ll notice the dashboard page is more friendly. It has ‘Add task’ right there as soon as you login (because that’s the first thing most people do!)

After this update, we’ll be adding time zones, more graphs and then… then we’ll be moving it to a better server setup with more power, more stability, and more sex appeal! We’ve been working hard on other projects for people so we can pay for a better level of service, and you beta guys will get a great deal.

By the way, is anyone running out of sheets? Get in touch if you are, we’ll add more for you.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements

We love APIs, and since 37signals announced the Basecamp API, I’ve been playing with a mobile version of Basecamp.

The code is currently a single ruby file, that uses their ruby wrapper for the API. If you’re interested, it uses CGI and erb, so it should be fairly easy to install if your hosting provider supports CGI and ruby.

When it’s ready, we’ll release it on code.helicoid.net.

Continue reading → | code, announcements

Tiktrac has been updated. We’ve added:

• The API, so developers can extract data and integrate Tiktrac with other applications
• A cleaner sheet page, allowing you to edit the sheet without leaving the page
• A search box on most pages, to help you find tasks easily
• A sheet list that appears on the sheet page, to allow you to navigate between your sheets more easily
• A cleaner login page
• A new reports type, that gives you a general overview of all your tasks and sheets when you visit the reports section

Let us know what you think!

Continue reading → | code, announcements, tiktrac

Whilst Gabriel’s been writing plugins for Rails, I’ve been writing JavaScript for one of our new projects.

Want to see it? If you can guess the nature of the application based on this:

we’ll let you in on the alpha version. The screenshot contains some JavaScript that helps us detect things about the user’s browser. Detecting the browser type, version, screen resolution, css rendering mode, and other technical factors are part of the project.

Post a comment describing what you think the project does!

Continue reading → | announcements

We’ve just added another report to Tiktrac, and added a few bugfixes that we’ve been hard at work on over the last week.

If you’d like to see more reports on Tiktrac, please tell us what kinds of reports you’d like to see. You can use our contact form to get in touch, or post comments to this blog.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements

This week has seen some exciting developments for Tiktrac. We’ve added graphs to the Reports section and improved the interace of Reports overall. We’ve also added sparklines to your account dashboard. These are small graphs that illustrate recent activity for people and your timesheets.

Tiktrac now also supports hours and minutes as time formats for each of your sheets. When viewing a sheet, click on ‘Edit this sheet’, and you will see an option for the time format. If you switch from minutes to hours, it won’t actually change the underlying information, it will simply display hours and let you enter hours instead of minutes.

In more detail, the changes we’ve made are:

Interface changes

• Fixed a bug in the date selector in Internet Explorer.
• Improved the reports section. You can now navigate between reports more easily, and switch between hours and minutes.
• We have removed links that delete items, replacing them with buttons. This is intended to help p…

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac

Thanks to all our beta testers for the excellent feedback! Gabriel and I have been working very hard this week, employing the little-known rule of software development: test, test, test, then test some more until you fall asleep at the keyboard. We’ve also started adding small tweaks that our beta testers have requested.

• Interface – Added loads of small changes to make the user interface more friendly.
• Interface – Added the contact form to every page, so if you’re really having problems with your account you can easily get in touch with us.
• Interface – Gabriel made an excellent favicon, so Tiktrac looks great in your bookmarks.
• Interface – We’ve added another template to the Appearance setting.
• Technical – We’ve made as much as we can valid XHTML Transitional, which should be everything, and we’ve also fixed a JavaScript error.
• Technical – We’ve added robots.txt to your accounts, so they don’t get indexed by search engines.
• Technical – Fixed date formatting …

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac

Multitap.net has had several bugfixes and improvements added today. Most are small enchancements to the interface based on recent feedback.

Some of the members of the growing Multitap.net found that comments were too short, so we’ve increased the size.

If you can think of any other changes, don’t hesitate to contact us, or post a comment to this post.

Continue reading → | multitap, announcements

First of all, happy holidays to everyone who uses our sites!

Secondly, Multitap.net has been upgraded. As well as a few consistency improvements to various features, we’ve added a ‘friends’ system which allows you to add users to a friends list. This will be extended in 2006 to provide more sophisticated features, but the bare minimum is there.

This allows me, for example, to keep track of what Kev is posting to the site. I like to keep an eye on what images he’s posted, so he’s been added to my friends list.

To support this feature, we will be improving the ‘user page’ to include a brief overview of their friends’ screenshots. All will come in due time… And, please share your ideas for the site with us!

Continue reading → | multitap, announcements

We’ve finally launched Tiktrac! Tiktrac, a timesheet package aimed at small to medium-sized businesses, has been created to serve a specific task in a simple and elegant manner. As such, we have used Ajax to enhance user experience: our primary goal was to make it as quick and easy to use as a spreadsheet.

Tiktrac is currently in beta, and as such we recognise that any small wrinkles may lead to changes in the near future. Therefore, Tiktrac will be free to use during the beta period.

We hope Tiktrac relinquishes you from the shackles of emailing spreadsheets or legacy applications! And, as always, please contact us to request features and suggest improvements to the service.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements

We’re in the final stages of testing Tiktrac, our timesheets software.

For a long time, we have had to put up with spreadsheets for timesheets. So one of us initiated a project to create a simple Ajax time management application, and then we both evolved it into something quite sophisticated.

We have also updated the Tiktrac homepage, so you can read more about the features it will launch with.

Continue reading → | announcements, tiktrac

Multitap.net’s source has just reached a milestone: revision 100. This contains new features and improvements which we hope to launch before Christmas:

• Add people to a friends list to help keep track of friends
• Friendlier date formatting
• Consistency improvements to the design across the site

One of these features was suggested to us to a user of the site. If you wish to request features, you can use the contact form on the site, or post comments to this weblog.

Continue reading → | announcements, multitap

Multitap.net, our first project, was launched on December 6th, 2005.

Multitap.net was designed to allow gamers to post screenshots of action during play, something we have done ourselves using forums and various image hosting services. We never felt current image hosting services were inadequate for this task, so we decided to build Multitap.net.

People are already starting to find out about it, and of course, suggestions are flying in on what features we should add…

Of course, following our mantra of simplicity, the features are very basic at the moment. We hope to work with the community to bring direction to future developments, only adding features the community wishes to see.

During beta, the site will be free. So get posting screenshots!

Continue reading → | announcements, multitap