LAUNCH: The Backpack Calendar

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:

1. Overview: Get a feel for the basics (adding events, creating calendars, etc).
2. Sharing calendars: Check out how easy it is to share your calendars and subscribe to other people’s calendars using the popular iCalendar format.
3. The layout: A quick overview to the grid and day view.
4. 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:

1. Repeating events
2. European date preference
3. Drag and drop events in IE (it works great in Firefox and Safari, but IE 6 wasn’t playing nice)
4. 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