We recently updated the homepage for Tiktrac, our time sheets web application. While going over the copy we had an interesting idea: why not include a dynamic counter for the total time tracked?

So now you can see the total amount of time recorded by the Tiktrac community. It currently displays 22210 hours, which is almost 1000 days.

That’s a lot of work… maybe soon we’ll have to switch the counter to days instead of hours!

Continue reading → | tiktrac, thoughts, fun

If you’ve read my previous posts on Helipad you’ll know it was created by me, to solve a particular need I had: the fusion between my personal notepad and the web.

It seems as if this was a relatively controversial thing to do: literally thousands of people are talking about Helipad. They’re comparing it to other services, pointing out the differences, wondering what people will do with the add-on system and other interesting discussions.

The upshot is, we’ve had almost 2000 signups in a week, which means Helipad is more popular than any other Helicoid application. And, many of the people who have signed up have provided feedback through our bug reporting system or by getting in touch with our contact form. Feedback is very important to us, so to all you who have emailed suggestions, ideas, bug reports and questions: thanks! We appreciate all your help. We endeavour to answer all your queries personally, even if it means …

Continue reading → | helipad, thoughts

I’m still working hard on that pet project I mentioned a few days ago. Before I can unleash it, there’s a bit of work left to do on documentation and tidying things up. This project embodies a few concepts that we hope to add to other Helicoid products, which you can see illustrated in this screenshot:

That’s running straight off the development version, and gives you a few clues as to what we’re attempting to do. As I said in my last post, I’m actually using this day-to-day, and it’s pretty great! I can’t wait to release it to beta testers, and I’ll give you details on that through this weblog.

Meanwhile… This weekend could be the date Tiktrac finally gets a different type of view on the sheet page: I’ve been working on expanding it beyond monthly views. This is another step towards a production-ready version!

Continue reading → | thoughts, helipad, tiktrac

I’ve got some friends using Box.net, so we can exchange files. I’ve found a lot of my friends get confused about FTP, and IM file sharing often gets screwed up by firewalls. This can be a real pain when you’re trying to work on something together over a large distance, especially when you’re swapping binary files like images or audio rather than text.

I logged in earlier and noticed:

True to their promise, they automatically upgraded my account based on my referrer count!

Box.net does everything you’d expect. There’s an API, and they’re developing an OS-specific sync/disk application. There’s also a mobile version:

All these things are made more straightforward by the fact they use an API. That’s why I love APIs, and that’s why we made the Helicoid slogan ‘agile apps with APIs’.

Read more about the mobile version of Box.net.

Continue reading → | thoughts