It’s hard to believe we didn’t have a proper calendar in Basecamp until June of 2011. Before that we had a list-based view which worked exceptionally well for nearly seven years, but people still like looking at dates and deadlines on grids. We get it! ;)
We’ve made a few calendars in our time. Backpack has a great one – it served as our exclusive company calendar up until we built this new one in Basecamp. Now we run all our schedules with the new Basecamp calendar.
We wanted to make sure the calendar for the all new Basecamp was the best one we ever made. And the best one around, period. It’s not going to launch with everything we want, but all the basics are covered real well. We put a lot of time into the interaction details so it’s fast, smooth, intuitive, and flexible. We’ll continue to improve it and refine in over the coming months, post launch.
Here’s a video peek at what it looks like and how it works. There’s more to it than this – there’s a list view inside projects, and each event has a discussion page as well – but we’ll be saving those details for a future video.
Nathan
on 22 Feb 12This is awesome, I love all the subtle touches like smooth animations as things resize.
Why does clicking the month arrows scroll vertically? Seems like arrows pointing left/right should scroll left/right.
I was blown away when you popped open the left bar and everything resized some smoothly!
Humby
on 22 Feb 12Great UI and the animation is prefect, just enough.
JF
on 22 Feb 12Nathan, we still could switch it to vertical scrolling, but we liked the idea of the calendar being an endless long page.
Left/right arrows are pretty standard calendar navigation so we wanted to keep that as people expected it, but then throw in a little surprise with the up/down sliding.
Raymond Brigleb
on 22 Feb 12I appreciate the similarite to Backpack. Agreed, it’s your best calendar.
Nick
on 22 Feb 12Sweeeet! I can use it to build one-week gantt charts!
Yeah, no. That’s really nice :)
Sachit Gupta
on 22 Feb 12When adding an event, it’d be nice to be able to add a location or address, that would link to Google Maps.
Carson
on 22 Feb 12Gorgeous.
Ricky Salsberry
on 22 Feb 12Love the “Next X Weeks view” in the calendar. Switched personal calendars to next 3 weeks a while back, and it just feels so much better.
Brian Armstrong
on 22 Feb 12Wow – a lot of nice touches on there. Awesome work guys!
Is it backbone.js or what js framework did you use? (if any)
Sarah
on 22 Feb 12@37signals
So what’s so great about this calendar?
Seems to be like any other web based calendar I’ve used for the past 6+ years.
SF
on 22 Feb 12Nice UI. But coincidentally, i’m rereading getting real and you said a lot of things about not building gantt charts et al ..but this is basically a gantt chart.
Levi Figueira
on 22 Feb 12Jason, would you agree that this could eat into your Backpack subscriptions? I for one know that having this calendar in Basecamp removes the need for our Backpack account (which we only use for the company calendar)… I’m grateful for that but I’m just wondering about it from your business standpoint. :)
Joel Friedlaender
on 22 Feb 12I am also interested to hear the answer to Levi’s question.
It would be great if you could do a post soon on how you use your own products internally (and how they fit together). These videos have given a glimpse inside, and I was surprised for example how many projects you have in Basecamp, clearly it’s not just for the traditional sense of a project.
Eugen
on 22 Feb 12really cool!
especially the popup when you click on “Next 6 weeks” – we have been suggesting this for a long time to you :)
this calendar needs only one thing that no other calendar has: smooth scrolling from week to week.
it seem like you have the foundation for this. it would be really good to go from week to week an not in big 6 week steps. real time flows why not a calendar, too?
Mark Copeman
on 22 Feb 12To think, Microsoft have been designing outlook for 15? years. You guys tackle calendars in 6 months and this is what you come up with.
In a parallel universe, they really could have taken over the world. Instead, they squandered the opportunity, because they got complacent.
Hats off to you for such thoughtful design.
Microsoft Outlook designers, take note.
Mark
Rich
on 22 Feb 12Jason: Does the drag and drop method for date changes work in browsers on touch devices like iPads and the rest? Shamesless request: can I try it out?
Thomas
on 22 Feb 12Is it now possible to define a time period for an event? e.g. Meeting 3 pm to 5 pm. That would be very important for internal uses. So I know when a meeting is finished or when a person is back in the office.
DHH
on 22 Feb 12Thomas, no end times in this version. But all events have a comment section so you could add it there. Or you could put it in the title ala “TPS Report Meeting [3 hours]”.
Rick
on 22 Feb 12I somehow hope you guys will make this calendar solution open source for others to use.
Even if its paid, i’d totally use it and customize it. I would slightly alter the functionality to create a reservation system based on the 37signals code.
Thiago
on 22 Feb 12Awesome
Patko
on 22 Feb 12The glimpse into how you use Basecamp we can get from those videos is precious.
I’d like to read more about your approach to managing web projects with your products. I found many case studies on this blog, but just a few from your experience.
How do you lead a project through its lifecycle? From the initial idea, through design and development and then on through administration and support? How do you manage small running changes on active products? How do you note and where do you store essential information for sysops and new developers (like server locations, procedures, how to start developing on a project …)?
This videos give us some clues we can deduce, but a more thorough case would be great.
Iarfhlaith
on 22 Feb 12Calendar looks great guys. I’ve no doubt your UI decisions will be copied by developers all over the web (again). Imitation is the best form of flattery afterall.
But I can’t help think that in one case you may have taken a step backward. What’s with the Basecamp logo in the top left hand corner of the screen?
I always admired Basecamp’s distinct lack of branding. Fingers crossed I can replace it with a company logo or project icon.
Caio Braga
on 22 Feb 12really nice work with this calendar! I’m currently using Asana and one of the things that I miss is a calendar view of the projects. Are you considering including a Gantt diagram view or something similar too? thanks!
MattCoder
on 22 Feb 12Hi all,
I’m new on webdevelopment and curious on how did you do to draw?
I mean, it’s a html5 feature? Are built over a grid?
Sam
on 22 Feb 12I have to say, I agree with Mark, it does have a thoughtful design. Microsoft Outlook is not as user friendly as it should be. Good instructional video too.
Richard Druce
on 22 Feb 12I’d much rather see basecamp focus in the direction of synching with my existing calendaring / contact solutions rather than reimplementing another solution.
Scott
on 22 Feb 12It would be great if you open sourced the code behind this calendar or even sold it as a licensed product.
Anonymous Coward
on 22 Feb 12careful with that axe jason
James
on 22 Feb 12I like it.
Kind of reminds me of http://dev.elevationblog.com/2009/7/23/event-calendar-rails-plugin, but taken to the next level.
James
on 22 Feb 12Love what I see so far. I will second the vote for someday adding end times to meetings. That would be the first step towards adding weekly or even daily views. Keep up the great work
KB
on 22 Feb 12For the love of Jobs could someone puhleeeeze tell me with a straight answer: will Basecamp Next cost me any more than I currently pay for Basecamp?
JF
on 22 Feb 12Next and Classic will be priced similarly. We haven’t nailed down the prices/plans yet, but we expect that they’ll be very similiar.
CIndy
on 22 Feb 12LOVE the changes. Pretty please tell me it can do repeating events… Having to add staff meeting to every Tuesday or remembering to add staff birthdays and anniversaries to the following year is a bummer.
Daniel Øhrgaard
on 22 Feb 12Awesome – great, great execution on the drag-drop. Now I’ll spend the rest of the day figuring out how you made that work, code-wise :)
Also:
I now have a very clear mental image of you, Jason, angrily flipping the bird at some some calendar on your screen :)
JF
on 22 Feb 12LOVE the changes. Pretty please tell me it can do repeating events… Having to add staff meeting to every Tuesday or remembering to add staff birthdays and anniversaries to the following year is a bummer.
No repeating events on launch, but we want them too. We’ll get ‘em in there not too far down the road.
I now have a very clear mental image of you, Jason, angrily flipping the bird at some some calendar on your screen
I choose my words very carefully!
Daniel Øhrgaard
on 22 Feb 12@JF: Glad to hear it! I do like to think it was on purpose :)
Jokes aside, it’s been great videos so far, in terms of production alone. No mumbling or “uhmmm”. Good pacing, natural delivery, etc.. Especially liked the little “no, let’s not use ‘Test’” bit
Anders
on 22 Feb 12Looks cool! I would maybe add some additional affordance/clue that “Next 6 weeks” is klickable. Maybe a small downward arrow next to it or something like that to make it more obvious. I probably wouldn’t have figured it out otherwise.
Saurabh Nanda
on 22 Feb 12How is this different from almost any web-based calendaring tool?
JF
on 22 Feb 12Saurabh, it’s different in that it’s currently vaporware!
Ian
on 22 Feb 12@37signals
(not sure if your deleting my question or your blog software isn’t working but my comment isn’t posting, so sorry for repeating myself)
Question: This product looks more like BackPackit Next instead of BaseCamp Next.
Why do you feel like the is the “next” evolution of BaseCamp as opposed to BackPackit?
Tim
on 22 Feb 12Really nice, smooth, intuitive design. After years of being forced to use MS Outlook’s calendar at work this seems light years ahead. Love the ability to drag the multi-day time blocks around, and the auto-wrapping is especially cool. Nice.
Andrew Carter
on 22 Feb 12Would love to see iCal support for creating events on my iPhone. Backpack calendar has iCal subscriptions but read-only.
JF
on 22 Feb 12Andrew: That’s definitely on the list to explore. We want to offer two-way editing/adding as you describe. It’s fairly complicated to do well, so we’re going to spend some more time on it. It won’t be part of the initial release.
Henrik
on 22 Feb 12Hi!
It’s looking good.. I do have one (for me) important question. Does the calendar in any way work with google calender? Preferably 2 way sync, if not it would be great to be able to subscribe to some (or all) of the Basecamp calendars in google cal.
Looking forward to the launch!
BTW will Basecamp still include Templates?
Henrik
Aymeric
on 22 Feb 12How do you get the smooth sliding transitions from one month to another. Do you preload the data (unlikely) or do you load the data while the animation is running? In which case what happens if the data takes longer to load than the animation?
AC
on 22 Feb 12I agree, this does seem more like Backpack Next – not Basecamp Next.
EH
on 22 Feb 12Cindy: As it turns out, repeating events are kind of hard. Annuals are simple enough, but quickly you approach events scheduled “every third Thursday” have be calculated continually or cached from the beginning and recalc’ed upon changes. I’m sure there are other implementations to be had, to be sure.
If you look at the event scheduling pane for something like Orage, you’ll see all of this in spades, yet I don’t know of anybody who has been able to simplify the recurrence problem down to an easily manageable interface, much less anything natural language based or otherwise intuitive (cf. Runt). Furthermore, building upon project management you might have event dependencies and “earliest start” and “latest finish” type timeblocking. For Aggrefolio, I am taking more of an Orage approach since the complexity has benefits for creative types who have more fluid and irregular calendar needs. Whether they can handle the complexity remains to be seen, however.
Kaz
on 23 Feb 12Hi, Was wondering if for the multi-day events if you could have it where you only have them over working days eg: Mon-Fri.
It is often very misleading to have them go over the weekend when work is not happening over the weekend.
We currently are running 34 projects in our Basecamp and it something that many if our clients mention to us.
In reference to everything else I have seen on the calendar function and the new BC functionality in general for the projects is fantastic.
Looking forward to testing it out!
Thank you.
Ron Stauffer
on 23 Feb 12I apologize if this has been answered before—is there an elegant way to “upgrade” Basecamp Classic to the new Basecamp? If we like the new version, do we import old projects into it? Or just start over with new projects? I’m just trying to imagine what the transition is going to be like. Putting one foot in the old and one foot in the can be pretty awkward.
Robin Fisher
on 23 Feb 12@aymeric
I was curious about that as well. I think they may load it all in one go on the basis that users are unlikely to put a significant number of events in a calendar more than 6 months out from today’s date and the cost of rendering a blank calendar is probably minimal.
JF
on 23 Feb 12Ron, once the new Basecamp is out you’ll have the option to copy projects over from Classic into the new Basecamp.
Ivan Brezak Brkan
on 24 Feb 12Will there be recurring todos in the new Basecamp?
JF
on 24 Feb 12Will there be recurring todos in the new Basecamp?
Not in the initial launch. Don’t know about the future yet.
Paula-Manivelas puerta
on 27 Feb 12Nice one, love it! If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered!hahahaha
Gerd
on 27 Feb 12Well done! Took a long time….
Lucía-Chupetes con nombre
on 27 Feb 12Like it! Flexible, practical Waiting for the next video!
This discussion is closed.