The Backpack Calendar is here. It’s available as a tab in everyone’s Backpack account, but it’s only accessible for paying customers. This is what you call an incentive to upgrade ;)
Watch and learn
A great way to be introduced to something new is to 1. dive in and use it yourself, or 2. watch someone else use it. We’ve put together a few Quicktime movies with audio that help demonstrate the basics:
- Overview: Get a feel for the basics (adding events, creating calendars, etc).
- Sharing calendars: Check out how easy it is to share your calendars and subscribe to other people’s calendars using the popular iCalendar format.
- The layout: A quick overview to the grid and day view.
- Getting around: This tour shows you how to move through the calendar and a few shortcut tips to jump directly to any day/month at any time. These shortcuts make Backpack extra useful — especially when someone calls you and says “Hey, are you free on November 12th?”
Props to Sam
Our very own Sam worked his heart out on this one and we love him even more for it. It’s simple on the surface but it was complex behind the scenes. Building a modern web-based calendar is building an entire new product. The development of this calendar took about 2.5 months and a few things didn’t make the 1.0 cut. We’ll be working on those next. The biggest headache was IE 6 support.
What’s next for the calendar
A few things that didn’t make the 1.0 cut that we plan to add are:
- Repeating events
- European date preference
- Drag and drop events in IE (it works great in Firefox and Safari, but IE 6 wasn’t playing nice)
- And some minor design issues that we had to introduce in all browsers in order to accomodate for IE 6 (bastard!).
We have some other stuff planned too, and we have some edges to polish up, but we’re really thrilled about this initial release.
We hope you like it
We’re really excited about this calendar. Personally this will be the first web-based calendar I actually use. I’ve tried the others but none of them really resonated with me. Too many popups, too much stuff getting in the way, too many different views, clutter, etc. So here’s our offering. We hope you like it.
If you don’t have a Backpack account please consider signing up. The calendar feature is only available for paying plans, but those start at only $5/month (no contracts, no signup fees, no termination fees, cancel at any time). Thanks again.
July 27, 2006 in New features & updates
Hot on the heels of the Basecamp Affiliate Program, we bring you the Backpack Affiliate Program!
The Backpack Affiliate Program allows you to earn credits that are applied towards your Backpack account. These credits reduce your subscriptions fees and allow you to earn free service. It’s your reward for helping us spread the word about Backpack. EVERYONE who has a Backpack account is eligible!
When someone uses your affiliate code/link to sign up for a new account, you’ll receive a credit on your account if they upgrade and pay for their first month.
When they upgrade you get…
Premium: $10 credit
Plus: $5 credit
Basic: $3 credit
You can read all about it and get starting earning credits today — just log into your account, click the Account tab, and then click the “Affiliate program” link at the top of the screen.
Thanks again for spreading the word!
December 19, 2005 in New features & updates
We just released a new product today called Writeboard. Writeboard is a simple collaborative (or solo) text editor with simple revision history and change comparisons. It lets you write, share, revise, and compare.
And oh yeah, it’s part of Backpack too. Look for the Writeboards tab at the top of the screen. You can also attach Writeboards to your Backpack pages by clicking the Writeboard button on a Backpack page.
Free Backpack accounts are allowed to create 2 Writeboards. Paying accounts (all levels) can create unlimited Writeboards.
Enjoy!
October 3, 2005 in New features & updates
By popular demand, you can now set recurring reminders in Backpack.
Recurring reminders are only available when you select “At a specific time” in the new reminder time pulldown (the standard “later today,” “tomorrow,” etc options don’t allow for recurring reminders).
When you set a reminder “At a specific time” you’ll now see a pulldown menu labeled “Remind me” with the default option set at “just this once.” You’ll also see options for “every day,” “every week,” “every month,” and so on. Selecting one of those will set an identical reminder at the interval specified. See the screenshot below:
Note: You’ll only see a future reminder once the current one has past. For example, if you set a reminder to repeat every week, you’ll only see the next upcoming one. When that one has passed the next one will automatically show up in your list.
We hope you enjoy recurring reminders in Backpack! Thanks for your continued support and stay tuned for more.
September 22, 2005 in New features & updates
We’ve just pushed the following changes live:
- The “My Pages” link will now always appear in the sidebar — even if all your pages are already in the sidebar. This way you can get at your tags listing anytime.
- The trashcan icon has been moved to the front of completed to-do items so it’s easier to delete completed items rapidly.
- A link to upgrade benefits is now visible at all times on free accounts
- Various other small HTML/CSS tweaks
August 15, 2005 in New features & updates
In our never-ending quest to improve the Backpack experience we’ve made a small tweak that we think will make people much happier.
Starting now, when you hover over a note title or a to-do item title the “Edit” link now shows up at the front of the item. The Trashcan to delete the item is still at the end of the item, but having “Edit” at the front means you never have to “chase” the Edit link down the line or onto the next line. It’s always in the same place for each item.
We hope you find the change useful.
July 14, 2005 in New features & updates
By popular request, today we introduce “Drag and Drop” reordering for to-dos and notes. Clicking the “reorder” link below a to-do list, or at the bottom of the your notes, will reveal little “DRAG” icons like this:
Clicking and dragging the DRAG icon up and down will allow you to reorder the to-dos in a list, or a series of notes on a page. Watch a video demo of drag and drop reordering.
Note that when you reorder notes the notes collapse into just the titles for easy reordering. Once you are done reordering, click the “reorder” link again to hide the drag icons and return everything to normal.
We hope you enjoy drag and drop reordering and thanks for your continued support. We have a lot more planned so stay tuned!
Note: If you are using FireFox and drag and drop isn’t working for you, please see this thread in the forums.
June 23, 2005 in New features & updates
We think we’ve fixed the “script error” printing issue some folks using Internet Explorer 6 were experiencing. Please let us know if you continue to have this problem. Thanks for your patience.
June 3, 2005 in New features & updates
Plus and Premium Backpack plans now offer fully secured 128-bit SSL encryption to keep your data safe as it travels over the internet. This is the same level of security provided by online banks. SSL is especially helpful for small businesses using Backpack to keep more sensitive data, passwords, etc.
The downside to SSL is that it’s slower, so if security isn’t your top priority (for many people this level of security is overkill if you’re just keeping track of your favorite movies or sharing some photos with friends) you can turn SSL off on the Settings screen.
Attention Basic Plan subscribers: For only an extra $4/month, you can upgrade to Plus and get SSL plus 5 times the pages and more than twice the disk storage space. There’s never been a better time to move to Plus. To upgrade, log into your account and click the Account link.
May 19, 2005 in New features & updates
We just fixed a stubborn bug that was causing the body of a page not to be updated on shared pages. Now everyone should see the latest version of a page when they load/reload.
May 17, 2005 in New features & updates
As requested, we’ve added Smart Communications (for the Philippines) and Vodafone Sweden to the list of mobile phone providers on the Settings screen for Backpack reminders.
May 15, 2005 in New features & updates
Tags are all the rage these days, but they’re more than hype — they’re useful too. Today we introduce tags to Backpack. Tags? Huh? What are tags?
The top of each page now has a little grey link that says “add tags” — click that link to tag a page. You can add as many tags as you’d like. For example, if you have a page related to a business meeting with a client you might consider tagging that page: Business Meeting Clientname May 2005.
When you click on a tag it will reveal all the other pages wth the same tag. This way you can quickly move between related pages. You’ll also see a list of all your tags on your My Pages page. Click a tag to filter your list of pages.
The more pages you have the more useful tags are. Have you upgraded yet?
→ Check out this tagging demo video — it really helps make sense of it all.
May 12, 2005 in New features & updates
Think of a tag as a simple category, or label, or keyword. With tags you can categorize your Backpack pages any way you want. Then when you click a tag you can see all the other pages that have that tag. It’s a great way to keep your pages loosely grouped in ways that make sense to you.
How about an example?
For example, if you have a page called “Sales meetings” you might want to tag that page “business, meeting, sales, office” or whatever you feel best describes this page. Or, if you have a Backpack page for your car, you might want to tag it “car, BMW, auto, transportation”.
So then what?
Once you’ve tagged a page (you can add as many tags as you want to a page), you’ll see the tags at the top of the page. Clicking a tag will show all the other pages with that tag. Or, you can click the My Pages link in your sidebar. On that page you’ll see a list of all the tags you’ve created. Click a tag and you’ll see the list of pages that match that tag.
They’re yours
Tags are yours. You can tag your pages any way you want. There are no rules or right ways or wrong ways — there are only your ways. While someone else might tag a business-related page with “business” you might tag it “work” — either one is fine.
Watch a video demo
Seeing is believing (Quicktime movie).
May 12, 2005 in New features & updates
Editing the body of your pages used to be confusing — you had to click the dim ‘Body’ button to edit. Now, after you add body text, the ‘Body’ button is simply replaced by a link that says “Edit Body”. Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback on the issue!
May 12, 2005 in New features & updates
To celebrate the 1-week anniversary of Backpack, today we launch Backpack Mobile. Now you can get to your Backpack from wherever you are.
If you have a Treo, mobile phone, or wireless PDA with a web browser that can display basic HTML, you can now use a slimmed down version of Backpack on your phone.
With Backpack Mobile you can…
- View any page
- Add list items and notes to pages
- Make a new page
- View and add reminders
…all over your phone or wireless PDA.
To use Backpack Mobile, simply load up your Backpack URL on your phone or PDA and add “/mob” to the end of the address. For example, if your username is 37signals you’d go to http://37signals.backpackit.com/mob or if it was spinfree you’d go to http://spinfree.backpackit.com/mob. Note: You may need to add /mob/login if /mob alone isn’t working.
A note about compatibility: We’ve kept Backpack Mobile very simple (it’s just simple HTML - nothing fancy), but it is still possible that Backpack Mobile won’t work on all phones or PDAs. With so many models on the market, and so many different PDA-browsers out there, total compatibility is a lofty goal. We’ll do what we can within reason to make sure Backpack works on as many popular configurations as possible, but we can’t make any guarantees. Thanks for your understanding.
We hope you enjoy Backpack Mobile!
May 10, 2005 in New features & updates
Many people have multiple email addresses these days. This can be a problem when sharing Backpack pages since the person who wants to share a page with you needs to know the email address you signed up with. Well, they used to need to know — we’ve fixed that now.
When someone shares a page with you, the email you get now lists two URLs — 1. a URL if you don’t have an account, and 2. a URL if you do. If you have an account, click the second URL and the page will then be shared with the account you already have instead of you having to set up a new account.
We hope this makes sharing pages much easier. Share away!
May 5, 2005 in New features & updates
