It’s been a long time coming, but today we’re proud to officially announce the launch of the new Backpack.
Find out what’s new and give it a try. If you already have a Backpack account, just log in and you’re golden. If you don’t have an account, sign up for a free account and give it a shot.
This was a full team effort. Everyone was involved. We tore out the insides and rebuilt it from scratch. The UI is finally a modern 37signals interface. We’re very happy with the final product.
Thanks again for everyone’s patience and support during the development process. It took longer than anyone would have liked, but it was worth it.
Ken Walker
on 25 Jul 07Gasp! You shipped without the OpenBar?! Still, nice job on the release!
Simon
on 25 Jul 07Guys – great work. This has been a long time coming, and I’m really enjoying it. Sorry to nitpick, but would it be possible to take away the “this is new” bar from the top…?
Anyways, congrats again – awesome release.
Si
Drew
on 25 Jul 07“We’re very happy with the final product.”
Me too – thanks for the updates!
jonezy
on 25 Jul 07excellent work! can’t wait for the open bar integration as well. Love all the new features and I upgraded back to a pay account this morning as well.
Eric
on 25 Jul 07I wish I could move just an item in a list to a list in a different page.
J.D.
on 25 Jul 07Love the updates. Would still love to see a way to group pages on the sidebar together, e.g, by personal, work, clients, etc., without having to “tag” the start of page title.
Brian
on 25 Jul 07ditto: What J.D. said
Alan Jacobs
on 25 Jul 07Been playing with it all morning—it’s a sweeping and excellent upgrade. There are a few little quirks, but that’s to be expected, and I know those will get ironed out. Y’all have just made it much, much easier for me to organize my life almost completely with Backpack. Thanks!
JF
on 25 Jul 07There are a few little quirks, but that’s to be expected
Yup, we’re working through the list right now. We’ll be pushing minor updates all day long. Thanks for your patience.
Nathaniel
on 25 Jul 07Jason, has the email feature been updated or did I just never pay attention to what all I could do?
Either way, being able to tell Backpack what I’m emailing it is really cool.
Matt
on 25 Jul 07Well you broke the dashboard widget, but it was worth it! Thanks dudes.
DjD
on 25 Jul 07Thanks very much fellas! Can’t wait to sink my teeth into it.
JF
on 25 Jul 07Nathaniel, it’s always done that. We just didn’t do a good job explaining it before. Now we do.
Matt
on 25 Jul 07Guys – the upgrade is excellent. I’m thinking of upgrading (beyond my current payment plan). ;-)
Ignore the nitpicking. I’d love it if my plasma television would do laundry, but, alas, I’ve learned that I can’t have everything.
Congrats…and keep up the great work.
Mike Trotzke
on 25 Jul 07Looks great!—been trying it out all morning.
Couple of quick questions:
Is the API going to be backwards compatible? or is it just down temporarily? I’m getting errors from backpack pages and backpack publish firefox plugins. I’m trying to decide if I should uninstall until new versions are available or if it’s just a short term thing.
Also my links to other pages are still there, but I can’t figure out how to add a new link… Am I blind?
Jeff Mackey
on 25 Jul 07Love it. Looks and functions great!
Ivan V.
on 25 Jul 07Thanks for the treats! I’m enjoying them very much.
One thing I was hoping would be included in the update (not that you hinted at it in any way), was for collapsable sections or elements.
I have some very large lists on a page, and it’s becoming very difficult to navigate, so it would be of great help if they were collapsable.
Just in case you suggest I might try moving lists to other pages, that’s not very useful because everything is related information (list of programs and configurations for when I do a bare bones setup of my workstation).
Well, I hope that feature is considered for the next version :)
John Topley
on 25 Jul 07This is a great update, especially nice to have a way to search. I’m hitting a lot of 503 errors, so I guess the servers are getting caned right now.
Brendon Cromwell
on 25 Jul 07Love the new backpack! Thanks for the great work.
Steve Rubel
on 25 Jul 07How about an iPhone interface?
Ed
on 25 Jul 07Just add /mob to the end of your backpack url. For example, name.backpackit.com/mob
Andrew
on 25 Jul 07Looks good… I’ll get back to Backpack when you add OpenID and OpenBar…
Eddie
on 25 Jul 07(Pedantic) On the bottom/footer of the “forwards” page: http://www.backpackit.com/email/forwarding, both the menu items “Emailing Notes” and “Forwards” are not linked, presumably Notes should be linked (like it is above)
Robert
on 25 Jul 07Looks good! Unfortunately there ist still no support for my mobile provider E-Plus (Germany). All other three German mobile providers are supported. Why not E-Plus?
Matt
on 25 Jul 07The new layout works great on the iPhone…especially with its ability to focus on and magnify blocks of text with a double tap. I’ve stopped using the /mob because it looks the same on my iPhone whether I go in natively or through the /mob door.
Skipping /mob avoids the teeny-tiny login screen, too.
Trevor
on 25 Jul 07Absolutely love it since I’m a drag and drop junkie.
Would love to see it integrated with the Open bar since I use Bascamp and Highrise with an Open ID already and love being able to flip between the two so easily.
MI
on 25 Jul 07Looks good! Unfortunately there ist still no support for my mobile provider E-Plus (Germany). All other three German mobile providers are supported. Why not E-Plus?
Robert, if you can provide us with the information we need to add them, I’d be happy to look into adding support for E-Plus. Check out this thread in the Backpack forums for more details.
Andy Kant
on 25 Jul 07I have a couple requests:
1. Would it be possible to re-add the ability to do line-breaks in a list item? The update causes list items to be saved when pressing enter (Shift-Enter for a line-break maybe?). I’m probably just using the app wrong since most of my list items could probably be considered notes…but “note lists” – a quick way of adding a note beneath another – don’t exist.
2. This might be considered feature creep, but a move to top/move to bottom ability on list items would be useful. I have a tendency of just adding anything new to the top list item since my main list doesn’t stay above the fold and dragging items to the top of a long list can get annoying.
Michael Doan
on 25 Jul 07I love the new re-order functionality. Great enhancement to an existing feature!
Willie Abrams
on 25 Jul 07blockquote styling with the nice quote marks seems to be gone or broken
Bob
on 25 Jul 07Man, you guys could be one step away from a seriously kick-ass social network (Backpack + Highrise news feed tech).
mid-waltz
on 25 Jul 07finally! yay! some great enhancements here, congrats! I wonder how was the switch from your inside point of view.. converting all the data and all. Sounds like a pretty big project.
so, now that you changed the whole codebase – which I imagine is better implemented and more flexible – can we expect more frequent updates in the future?
like collapsible notes? :)
Alex
on 26 Jul 07Thank you for adding “Move to different page” (nitpicking: yes, I wanted to be able to move list items, not only entire lists to other pages, too).
Thank you for adding search.
But some things seem broken now.
First of all, did you really have to reorder all my pages? Lists were above notes before, now they’re underneath. No fun reordering about 40 pages.
Fonts and line spacing look much bigger now than before. Too big, in fact (this is on Mac OS X 10.4 w/ Safari/Shiira).
Please, please, please, bring back time stamps for notes. Preferrably, with the year included.
I had a lot of hyperlinks in my list items and note titles which were broken after the upgrade. Looks like they’re fixed now, though.
But most of all, moving “units” inside a page or between pages is s-l-o-w. Before the upgrade, Backpack was very usable on my old Pismo w/ Safara/Shiira. Now these operations are dog slow. In addition, moving stuff up/down beyond the visible display area doesn’t seem to work at all. I have to take a break, scroll the page and resume the move, both inside a page and to another page.
Bryce
on 26 Jul 07Looks like Search doesn’t work on tags? Or perhaps there is just a slight delay after new-tag creation while tags get indexed?
Brandon
on 26 Jul 07I like the updates a lot as I’m using this more and more…but I’m still surprised a few features aren’t here. Examples:
Dragging items to move them is nice, but what about being able to simply change the order from most recent at the bottom to the bottom (like a blog)?
When scrolling down a long page, it would also be nice to be able to see the “Add a…” selections follow me down. Especially with a divider, I have to add it, then drag it slowly, section by section, until it’s where I want it.
XM
on 26 Jul 07I love the new interface. good job guys :) But when I was trying to print out my todo list as usual, it seems like there was some problem with the CSS for printing. Hope this is gonna be fixed soon. Keep up the good work 37 signals! I am becoming more and more dependent on Backpack in my life.
Thomas
on 26 Jul 07Nice update! It would be nice to be able to re-order the pages in the sidebar.
Darren Stuart
on 26 Jul 07congratz great release. I was like a kid in a toyshop.
Josh
on 26 Jul 07Thanks for a great update! I don’t use Backpack that often (I’m still on the free plan), but when I do it’s always a pleasure to use. Looking forward to OpenID support :). Btw, if you’d add PayPal paying options I’d definitely consider upgrading.
Jeremy Langworthy
on 26 Jul 07Ummmmmmm, it’s broken. Can’t log in. Just get a 503.
Josh
on 26 Jul 07I got that [503 error] too – but I’m on a free account so I can’t complain. Refreshed it once/twice and it worked. It’s probably just a minor glitch, like Jason said they’ll probably have it fixed soon.
Davide "Design" Muzzarelli
on 26 Jul 07When we can export files and images via API???
Eoghan McCabe
on 26 Jul 07Congrats, guys.
Search is the killer new feature, I believe. Everything else just makes what was already great, better!
Ryan Parman
on 27 Jul 07Good job! Definitely looks slicker, although Firebug is telling me that I’m getting frequent 503 errors. Once we get OpenID/OpenBar support, I’ll only have to keep track of one 37s bookmark instead of four (currently down to 2).
z
on 27 Jul 07i’d like to second Andy Kant’s request to add “move to top/move to bottom” for lists. also for basecampe (which is my primary app from 37s.
rationale: oftentimes as i’m adding a new todo item, it might have high priority. maintaining priority by sorting the list works beautifully. the only issue is, when adding a new high priority item to a long list, dragging it up becomes a drag (pardon the pun ;).
good stuff, guys, thank you! z
Ken Walker
on 28 Jul 07Just saw the OpenBar support at backpackit.com/new. Nice “scheduled maintenance” soft-launch guys. :) Much appreciated!
William
on 29 Jul 07Yay! I was wondering recently if it were ever going to come after you guys mentioned it so long ago. It’s awesome now!
that guy again with the Writeboard tables
on 30 Jul 07The update looks great. I couldn’t help but notice that the print CSS for Writeboard still doesn’t print table borders, even through the show up nicely on the screen. I’d sure like to be able to print tables out of Writeboard.
Keith Mancuso
on 01 Aug 07BUG!
I may be late to the game with this but i noticed that if you have a trailing slash in your openid in basecamp but not in your backpack openid then the backpack wont show up when your in basecamp…..remove the slash in both and everything works as to be expected…
Just thought i should mention it..
This discussion is closed.