We’ve been very hard at work overhauling and improving the tools on your Backpack pages. In the next few weeks we’ll release these new features, but first we wanted to give you a little preview of one of the major changes.
Once we release this update you’ll be able to move any list, note, image, file, etc. around on the page. You can put a note at the top, then a list, then a file, then another note, then a list, then another list, then a photo gallery, etc. You’ll be able to organize a page any way you’d like.
Stay tuned. We think you’ll like the improvements we have in store. They’re coming soon.
Dave
on 18 Oct 06Awesome work. I love it.
shane
on 18 Oct 06You guys are out of control! AMAZING!
The Colonel
on 18 Oct 06Wow, looks great.
This actually seems to solve a couple of the problems that I’ve heard people complain about in the past… mainly the inability to easily reorder things.
Quite spiffy!
Mike Rundle
on 18 Oct 06Yeah so I want to rearrange my neighbors… put the annoying ones with the yappy dog on the other side of my house so I don’t have to hear them in the morning. Can I borrow some 37s talent for, say, a few hours and have them put that together for me?
JF
on 18 Oct 06Sorry Mike, we’re not in the client business anymore ;) We haven’t moved loud neighbors since 2004.
Dave Rau
on 18 Oct 06Super dope drag and drop. That’s gonna be a good one!
p.s. The audio in that demo could be louder.
Tamim
on 18 Oct 06Great. I was waiting for this feature.
Thumbs up.
Dave Findlay
on 18 Oct 06Hurray! The restriction to adjacent lists for reordering list items was always frustrating, so it’s great that’s going away. Thanks guys.
matt Carey
on 18 Oct 06That is very cool!
Mo
on 18 Oct 06Very cool indeed!
Jeff Croft
on 18 Oct 06Looks very slick. Well done, guys.
Michael Hessling
on 18 Oct 06Holy draggin’ Batman!
nkp
on 18 Oct 06wow, screencast looks signalizing!
Gayle
on 18 Oct 06I’m so excited I’m giddy. Excellent.
Ben Eastaugh
on 18 Oct 06Nice, might have to get back into using Backpack.
Dan Boland
on 18 Oct 06Sick. Utterly sick. =)
James Head
on 18 Oct 06fiddly improvements:
1) clean up the drop shadows on the page area. They have hard edges, – jarring!
2) removing writeboards has different vernacular for their deletion, the text strign ‘remove’, while everything else has a trash can icon.
James Head
on 18 Oct 06Ah, – ‘remove’ removes the link from the page, but the writeboard lives on, while the delete icon actually deletes… nevermind :)
Ryan Bergeman
on 18 Oct 06Holy crapoli! Nice work!
Nirav Sheth
on 18 Oct 06I love 37 signals.
You’ve made it about 5x easier for me to manage all my girl friends and dates via back pack.
Thanks for the hard work that you do which makes it easy for players like me to keep doing what we do best.
Hey, pimp’n aint easy. But it is easier with backpack!
Scott Chacon
on 18 Oct 06What are you using for the Flash player? Home-rolled or something open source?
JF
on 18 Oct 06I take the movies in SnapzPro on the Mac, import them into Camtasia on the PC, and publish the movies in Flash with Camtasia. I run Parallels so I can run Windows software on my MacBook Pro.
forrestRain
on 18 Oct 06Thanks for this great updates!
Fred
on 18 Oct 06Did you consider optional columns? Too messy? I like the flexible layout of, say, Netvibes, with columns and tabs.
Come to think of it, their auto-recognition of links saves lots of time, too.
JF
on 18 Oct 06No columns. That’s a mess.
Backpack isn’t about packing as much information on the screen as possible. It’s about making clean pages you read from top to bottom once.
Rob
on 18 Oct 06Fred,
37signals doesn’t take customer suggestions (they usually do, add a “thank you”, and never look at it again). They pretty much do what they want from what I’ve seen.
But these new additions are pretty good. I like.
Matt Johnson
on 18 Oct 06besides, they give you enough pages to organize with anyway.
Beautiful update, can’t wait for it to be released!
Ben Delaney
on 18 Oct 06bravo! I was JUST yesterday considering whether or not I would stay a Backpack subscriber or make the big switch over to Google (Notebook, Calendar, Writely, et. al.) I wanted to say with you guys, but some of their feature-set was alluring. I think that now that I know a new Backpack is coming, I’m gonna stick around. I’ve always loved it, and these improvements are looking GREAT!! Keep up the good work.
RS
on 18 Oct 06Hi Rob. Actually 90% of the changes we make are based on feedback from our customers.
The number of possible changes, improvements, and additions is limitless. But there are limits to the number of pixels, the lines of code, the hours in a day. So we often have to say “no” to the constant stream of ideas. At the same time, every change we do make is a “yes”, and those “yes”es often sprout from customer feedback.
Derick
on 18 Oct 06The video looks interesting and it looks like an alright feature. But is it really needed?
Have I become conditioned soooo much by 37signals’ “simple” philosophy to think that this new feature is really not needed.
JF
on 18 Oct 06Derek, we love your spirit, but we really think you’ll like this ;)
Des
on 18 Oct 06That looks shit cool, nice work. Can I ask an fickle question and genuine one.
Fickle: What happens if you drop a list item in the middle of a paragraph?
Genuine Does anyone else out there wonder whether they should be using BackPack or BaseCamp for a task? Is there a general rule? Something like…
if ($needs <= blah) then BackPack else BaseCamp;
Gesen
on 18 Oct 06You guys always seem to come up with the absolute best and easiest ways to solve problems. Everything in this little demo looks amazing and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. I’ve been waiting some time for some updates to Backpack, and boy this made my day!
Charlie Jones
on 18 Oct 06Looks awesome. With all the time spent on making backpack better, I hope a little love was shown to repeating calendar events. ;)
Andy Kant
on 18 Oct 06I have been silently wishing for a feature like this, can’t wait. Hope you bring it to Basecamp next though. Thanks.
Deepak
on 18 Oct 06Love this new update!!! Looking forward to trying it out
Jack Shedd
on 18 Oct 06I rate everything on a scale of how much I wish I’d done it first.
I REALLY wish I’d done this first.
Good job.
You bastards.
JF
on 18 Oct 06Hope you bring it to Basecamp next though.
The list goodness in the new Backpack will be coming to Basecamp as well. Just not yet. We usually experiment with new Techniques with Backpack first and then move that knowledge to Basecamp. We do this because Backpack is simpler overall so it’s easier to work there first. So stay tuned, it’s planned.
Clay Johnson
on 18 Oct 06Have you guys just given up completely on Sunrise? It has been a year since that announcement was made.
Nick
on 18 Oct 06Great stuff. I use backpack every day and look forward to the release.
One thing I particularly like is the attempted standardization of the “drag” icon. Maybe the crosshairs icon is the new feed icon?
Mike
on 18 Oct 06Re: Backpack vs. Basecamp.
I use Backpack for projects that involve less than 6 or fewer people, and when there’s mutual trust that nobody is going to accidentally trash things.
For me, this is most projects.
JJ
on 18 Oct 06I use backpack and basecamp.
And both have different edit icons for each of items. Basecamp has “edit | delete” while backpack is “delete | edit”. It confused me.
Can’t you make it consistent?
JF
on 18 Oct 06Have you guys just given up completely on Sunrise? It has been a year since that announcement was made.
We’ve covered this in so many comment threads before…
We have not given up on it at all. It’s very much alive. We’re giddy about it over here, actually.
One thing we did, which we mentioned before, was started over once. We weren’t happy with the original version so we threw it all out. It was too complex. So that set us back, but it was a good set back. That set back allowed us to move forward again.
And then there were other things got in the way like completely moving our server cluster to a new hosting provider. That took a ton of time, energy, and focus from David which meant he wasn’t able to work on Sunrise. David also had to do a lot of sys admin work which took away from his programming time. Now that we’ve hired a full time sys admin we’ve got that better under control.
But we’re back on development and we’re really happy with how it’s going. That’s all we’re going to say. When we have something more to share about it we will. Until then, no news.
Clay Johnson
on 18 Oct 06Jason,
GREAT! How Exciting!
We’ve covered this in so many comment threads before…You might want to think about posting this information on this page: http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives…
As it seems like people are still commenting on it. That’s where I go to look for information on it.
—Clay
MH
on 18 Oct 06In response to Derrick, who thought this was a move away from simple: it’s actually a move towards simple—notice how you no longer have the “stop reordering” button which was awkward.
There’s a great Steve Jobs quote about this in a recent interview (yes, the “put it in her ear” one):
“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”
Jason
on 18 Oct 06I love all the drag & drop. When DHTML became popular in 1999, the multiple floating layers possibilities seemed endless but also disorienting and a pain to code. You guys have obviously thought & worked hard to make it all usable here. This looks like a beautiful mac application rather than a web page!
BTW the photo gallery drag & drop was really neat. Can you guys build a separate photo gallery site with that interface? I’d love to put up my vacation photos w/ an uploader and then drag & drop them into place. Maybe some way to directly add titles to them would be neat as well.
JF
on 18 Oct 06notice how you no longer have the “stop reordering” button which was awkward.
Not only do you not have the “stop reordering” link, you don’t even have a “reordering” one. You can reorder any time you want. You don’t have to enter reorder mode.
RS
on 18 Oct 06You can do this with Backpack. Email the photos to a page and then set the sharing option to “Public”.
ryan
on 18 Oct 06This is great guys! It is just the thing to get me excited about using backpack again…
Ken Rossi :: CivilNetizen.com
on 18 Oct 06Awesome. You guys never cease to amaze. It’s one of those simple “uh-duh” things. I know backpack is paid and tadalist is free. So opportunity cost doesn’t allow you to work with tadalist that much.
I use basecamp for almost everything except my personal to do list. I use tada for that. It’s simple and I don’t need any of the extra backpack features (yet at least). I use a greasemonkey script that allows you to move back and forth between lists. I love this little feature but unfortunately you have to install a firefox plugin to have it.
The only request that I hope people are making for tadalist whenever they get around to it…. is being able to see all to do lists at once as a view option not the only option and to be able to drag items between lists. Also, to integrate into the site what the greasemonkey script is doing.
Hopefully this backpack code will get used in tadalist sooner rather then later. :-)
Harper
on 18 Oct 06Thanks for the new backpack feature – that was the single best usability tweak you could have made – good choice!
Jim
on 18 Oct 06I love you guys, so no offense, but this type of thing is exactly why some of us seasoned vets find it so hard to follow your “no specs”, “Getting Real”, “what worked one time last year for our one big web app should work for you” philosphy.
Sam
on 18 Oct 06some of us seasoned vets find it so hard to follow your “no specs”, “Getting Real”
oh right, because enterprise spec’d software always turns out exactly how you expected it to, right?
Chris
on 18 Oct 06Too bad Mr. Show isn’t around any longer, ‘cause I can see it now… Backpack: The Movie “Man, I dragged the shit out of that list!”
Stuart
on 18 Oct 06Any chance there’s also updates to the calendar? I’m sure a lot of people would find repeating events, end times for events, and the ability to set the start day of the week to Monday or Sunday.
JF
on 19 Oct 06I love you guys, so no offense, but this type of thing is exactly why some of us seasoned vets find it so hard to follow your “no specs”, “Getting Real”, “what worked one time last year for our one big web app should work for you” philosphy.
First off, we say could work for you, not should work for you. As we’ve always said, these ideas aren’t for everyone. Use what works best for you. Try a little of this, try a little of that. Keep an open mind and see what comes out.
Now back to specs…
We could have written incredibly detailed specs and still ended up with the wrong product if the specs pointed us in the wrong direction. In fact that’s exactly what would have happened. What we believed then is not what we know now.
Specs don’t make something right, they make something concrete. We’re not fans of concrete. Specs make charge hard. They’re locks, not keys. Anything that makes change hard isn’t something we’re interested in.
If specs guarantee success for you, go for it. You should use what works for you. Specs don’t work for us so we don’t use them.
We’re smarter 2 months into the project than we are at the start of the project. We’re not smart (or psychic) enough to know everything about a project before it starts. We’re not confident enough to suggest that everything we’re going to do over the next 3-4 months can be determined on day one. We’re not clever enough to think of everything the product should do or everything it shouldn’t do before we’ve even begun to see it unfold.
We want to take advantage of that new wisdom to make better decisions along the way. If we see a better way we want to go there. If we see a simpler path, we want to follow it. That’s what we did with Sunrise.
If you want to find out more about our position, read our book.
albatross
on 19 Oct 06LIKE THAT The sooner the better Me glad :)
warren
on 19 Oct 06I think products like Basecamp are great because the interface is so polished and simple, and as the marketing page points out it could be used for anything from a wiki, to a featherweight CRM system, to a wedding planner, to a simple photo gallery, to whatever else you can think of.
I’ve had related ideas where the basic functionality is simple but allows for a wide variety of uses. The question that comes to mind is, how do you avoid making the user feel like “OK, this looks cool, but now what do I do [with this web app]?” I know a helpful green field/starting out page like Basecamp has helps. I guess I’m not entirely sure I can think like a typical user because I’ve been programming for so long that I can navigate through poor interfaces. I basically have no life and sit in front of a computer all day so I have a hard time thinking like someone who actually does have a life and concerns that don’t involve computers or technology in any way.
Some of the ideas I’ve had involve using sophisticated algorithms (not business logic, algorithms)—e.g., a super-simple data mining application. The output of these algorithms is simple to understand (e.g., a list of grouped items) but their internal workings would almost surely be a mystery to nearly all the users (I have an idea of how I think I could build something like Google News but I’m sure most people who visit it don’t). My question is, if you included something like that in an application, would not knowing how the application is doing what it does make them feel like they’re not in control?
John Schult
on 20 Oct 06simply_excellent = Basecamp.new(:keyword => ‘simple)
What can I say? I read “Getting Real” and you guys even followed your design tenets when writing the book. Each page was a testament to your credo.
Basecamp did not need much, but hats off to finding the one thing that really makes it more usable, but not more cluttered. Thanks for your excellent design patterns! (I rip them off all the time ;-)
M.Budowlane
on 30 Oct 06Thanks for this great updates!
mark
on 30 Oct 06Yes, very great !
mark
on 30 Oct 06Who is deleted my comment ?
mark
on 30 Oct 06Sorry, error :)
This discussion is closed.