Backpack is the new release from the makers of Basecamp, 37signals. Backpack, in a nutshell, is a personal organiser. Its seems like a ‘home’ version of Basecamp. It has pretty much the same features as Basecamp but it’s been arranged in a slightly different manner.
Pages
You create pages in your ‘backack’ and add certain things to it, namely:
- Text blocks, or Notes
- Files
- Images
- Lists
- Links
They give you some examples of pages you could create like a page to organize a craft project, store favorites in your city, a portfolio, client mock-up presentations, etc. The possibilities are endless!
The free version allows you to have up to 3 pages. You can, of course delete and reuse these as you see fit. Another cool feature of the pages is that you can share them with other people.
Reminders
This is probably my favorite feature of Backpack. As you can excpect from pretty much everything 37signals do the interface is really simple and a joy to use. Backpack can remind you in two ways - there’s the regular old email method (which i’ve tested - and as a result remembered to blog about Backpack this morning :) ) or there’s the SMS method (which is currently unavailable in New Zealand).
I’ve recently discovered the usefullness of a shared calendar thanks to Mozilla Calendar and Apple iCal. Both of these products make use of the iCalendar format. What this means is that i can have one centralised online calendar and subscribe to it using either Apple iCal or Sunbird. Nice you say - but what has this got to do with Backpack? Well - the reminder system in Backpack automatically creates an iCalendar link that you can subscribe to. Sweet as! My life just got a whole lot easier!
Changes
Now this is where things get interesting…You can track changes that other people have made to any page you are sharing. It shows you a chronological list of the changes made and by whom and it also generates an RSS feed of those changes. Phat, I love RSS - the more I can get, the better!
And?
And - I love it! I can see myself using this daily. I can see my mum using this daily! Go 37signals! Such a tight little application that is so open you can pretty much do what you want with it.
