Helicoid

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...

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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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...

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 Ap...

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. Wh...

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: ...

I’ve just completed the third article in my Rapid Rails series. Rapid Rails Part 1: Command-line mastery Rapid Rails Part 2: Rapid in the literal sense Rapid Rails Part 3: Desktop mastery If you’re interested in Ruby on Rails, or software development in general, check them out! They come straight from our experiences dee...

We updated Tiktrac this morning with a neater project selector. This makes managing lots of sheets much easier for those of you with large accounts. During the update we ran into unexpected server issues and had to perform emergency maintenance – this meant we had to take Helipad, Tiktrac and Ebiwrite down to fix the issue (they’re all on the same servers). During this maintenance we posted updates to Twitter and our service status page. It’s worth bookmarking out status page if you rely on our services, because we post the times and dates of any planned maintenance: http://status.helicoid.net/ Our twitter account can be found here: ...

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. ...

Kev (our sysadmin and morale officer) uses Helipad mobile in a unique way: he sets a tag’s page as his mobile browser’s homepage. This means he can quickly access documents suitable for his phone. In his case he uses documents tagged with “gtd” so he can easily keep track of todo lists. I thought it might be useful to have an ”@mobile” tag for documents you generally want to see on the move. We’re still working on the Helipad upgrade and Mac version, they’re almost ready! (Mac version needs serious testing to get synchro...

Helipad has been receiving some serious development effort recently, with the following new features going through final testing: The Edit/Preview/Share buttons have been moved alongside the save button, and work dynamically (no page reloads) The themes are being enhanced to make things appear smoother Big performance improvements These updates should go live within the next week. Despite Helipad being a free application, I get a lot of pressure to work on it because all my friends use it! It currently has around 5,000 users, wi...

Think (for Mac OS X) lets you focus on what you’re doing by creating a configurable backdrop behind a single application. It shows you a list of running applications (in the same style as pressing cmd-tab). It doesn’t do much more than that! One of the touches I like about it is it shows the currently selected application’s icon in the Dock. Of course, if you really need to focus hiding the dock might be a good idea. My current technique for 100% focus on work is simply quitting my email client. That pretty much frees up my brain for as long as I need to co...

I’ve been working on updating Basecamp Mobile to try and solve the login issues some users have reported. basecamp.helicoid.net is now running on a faster server I’ve updated legacy code and moved it to Rails 2 The public code repository has been updated: http://code.helicoid.net/svn/applications/bcm/ Many thanks to “ash” for his helpful suggestions. ...

Gunpei Yokoi, a former Nintendo employee and creator of the Game Boy, is also credited with an inspirational philosophy about innovating “mature” technologies. In his book Yokoi Gunpei Game House, Yokoi discusses his approach to improving on old ideas using lateral thinking to produce something both radical and innovative. He even suggested that pushing cutting edge technology sometimes gets in the way of developing a new product. It’s easy to draw parallels between his philosophy and the Nintendo Wii’s recent success. Wikipedia’s article on the topic even goes back...