Wed Jul 01
As well as Loom, I've been working on a few other open source projects funded by Helicoid. The biggest so far is JsChat which is an MIT-licensed JSON-based chat system with a nifty web interface: ...
What we do
Products: We build agile web applications aimed at individuals, freelancers and small businesses. Our apps have free and paid accounts, mobile phone support and web APIs.
Research: We're currently designing Mac desktop software and iPhone apps.
Commissions: Helicoid commissions art, get in touch for more info.
About us
Team: Alex Young is the company founder, developer and designer of Helicoid's apps. Yuka Young is a copywriter and manages customer support. Kevin Ford is our systems administrator.
Location: Helicoid is based in London, England.
Press: Visit our press resources for high quality icons and more.
Other projects
- Mobile blog
- TweetFu: Track trends on Twitter
- Kite: Mobile search
- Basecamp Mobile
- Multitap: Share game screenshots
- Open source
Fri Jun 26
Loom is our issue tracking system. It evolved from Bugtagger, which I created for internal use in 2006. Loom has a few nifty features: the bug report form automatically snoops browser and OS detail...
Fri Jun 26
Helipad is our free notepad web app, which we've been running since 2006. It's still going strong, and people keep discovering it every day. If you enjoy using Helipad, here are a few ways you can ...
Fri May 15
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 ...
Mon May 11
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 acce...
Mon Apr 20
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 Download and unzip DeadlineGro...
Sat Apr 18
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...
Wed Apr 15
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 o...
Wed Apr 01
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.
Tue Mar 31
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 d...
Thu Mar 26
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 re...
Fri Mar 06
This article is republished from Quite Useful (a guide to useful things).
This article is an introduction to iPhone development. You can use it to:
Decide if iPhone development is right for you
Un...
Fri Feb 27
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...
Fri Feb 20
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...
Mon Feb 16
Our new Tiktrac widget is out: get it on the Tiktrac widget page. This is an entirely new version that adds: Timers to every task Description editing (click a description to edit it) Delete tasks ...
Sat Feb 14
Tumblr can be extended heavily by editing the templates and by adding services through JavaScript. I just wrote this ShareThis JavaScript that will automatically add ShareThis buttons to your Tumb...
Wed Feb 11
The Helipad iPhone client has been released on the App Store for ?2.99. It'll sync all your Helipad documents so you can access them offline on your iPhone. It syncs both ways so you can add, edit,...
Sun Feb 08
Quite a few of the top 100 Twitter clients are mobile:
6. txt
7. TwitterFon (iPhone client)
9. Mobile web
With the popularity of Twitter's SMS feature and iPhone clients it seems like it's one of...
Mon Feb 02
We've moved this blog to a new server (it's hosted at Tumblr now, which cuts down some admin work for us).
Since the last post in 2008 I've been doing a lot of work aimed at Blackberry and iPhones....
Wed Jan 28
If you want to write software that works with Helipad, there's now an awesome Helipad gem written by Lonnon Foster. I've checked over the code, and it's clean and well-written. You could build a lo...
Wed Jan 14
In Rapid Fluid support I talked about adapting web applications for Fluid. Since Bubbles for Windows has a similar API I decided to write a wrapper around Fluid and Bubbles so you can support both ...
Sat Jan 03
We recently added SMS support to Deadline. Finding a bulk SMS provider that we liked was actually more work than supporting the technical requirements in our software. There used to be several free...
Fri Dec 26
Fluid is a Site Specific Browser (SSB) for Mac OS. It allows web applications to run in their own window with a dock icon, dock badge and supports Growl notifications. You can support Fluid in your...
Thu Oct 16
AssetAutoInclude is a new Rails plugin written by Gabriel (who helps me out with Helicoid's projects and works on Rails projects for all kinds of big companies in the US). It's designed to make Jav...
Thu Feb 07
If you've created an XHTML Mobile Profile-based site, you might have wondered how well it works on a BlackBerry. Fortunately, RIM provide a BlackBerry simulator, so you don't even need to own one ...
Mon Dec 03
Adobe's Mobile and Devices Developer Center contains resources for Flash Lite and Device Central, and also features articles about the wider world of mobile development. If you purchased CS3 recen...
Wed Nov 28
Drawing on Cameron Moll's experiences developing for mobile devices, Mobile Web Design aims to unite mobile web design with web standards. It features facts, statistics and practical advice, and e...
Fri Jul 06
Have you ever noticed how mobile services seem to follow an inverted Moore's Law?
Moore's Law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles ever 18 months. Using this as a...
Thu May 03
This will be of definite interest to people in the UK: Orange are going to be offering flat rate data plans. This could coincide nicely with the recent rapid growth of mobile social sites, since GP...
Sun Apr 22
The W3C Mobile Web Best Practices checker validates pages using tests defined in the W3C mobileOK Basic Tests. The tests produced results comparable to the .mobi tests, although they have no chart...
Sun Apr 08
The Top Level Domain (TLD) .mobi was launched last year. Registration prices were originally quite high, probably due to the inevitable new TLD fever. Prices have now subsided to be comparable wit...
Tue Mar 20
Imagine you're standing in Virgin Megastore, and you see a new videogame you haven't played before. You're not sure if you really want to lay down ?40 for it. If you were near your computer you cou...
Thu Nov 30
Opera have just released Opera Mini 3 after a successful limited beta. To get your copy, enter your mobile's number at http://www.operamini.com/ and they'll send you an SMS with a download link. Th...
Wed Nov 15
I've been reading the W3C's W3C mobileOK Basic Tests and Mobile Web Best Practices, and they're giving me some great ideas on how to improve my mobile applications.
Mobile Web Best Practices almos...
Wed Jul 26
Google are now offering a mobile stylesheet for use with their search appliance:
The Google Search Appliance Mobile Stylesheet defines a user interface for your Google Search Appliance to enable e...
Mon Jul 24
I just read Designing for Mobile by Brian Fling on the Blue Flavor weblog. Brian includes a set of slides which formed part of his talk at Webvisions. The slides contain some great material for th...
Sun Jul 16
xFruits is an interesting little tool that allows you to do clever things with RSS feeds. You can produce mobile web friendly versions of your feeds, so you could take your blog and produce a mobi...
Mon Jun 05
We wrote about Backpack Mobile a few months ago, the mobile version of 37signals' Backpack. We've recently launched a mobile version of Basecamp, another 37signals project which we can't live with...
Thu May 11
Mobilicio.us allows you to read your del.icio.us bookmarks using your phone. It's a simple implementation that's straighforward enough. To get a feel for how it works, check out the demo.
However,...
Wed Apr 19
Nokia have been working on using WebKit for some time, and recently released APIs for their S60 browser on opensource.nokia.com. What's interesting about this is they perceived the importance of sc...