Springpad: A Personal Information Manager

Springpad is a new web-based personal organizer, sharing vague similarities with my current favorite, Backpack (that I reviewed at length recently, Backpack: A Digital Version Of A Miscellaneous Drawer). Even though Springpad incorporates some cool ideas, several requirements are just missing that make it impossible to shift over, as much as I might like to. (Note: I also experimented with Drop.io as a Backpack replacement, and that just didn’t work at all.)

What’s Springpad’s Story?

As the developers say, “Springpads are free online notebooks that help you manage your life. Use your springpad to keep track of notes, photos, maps, to-do’s, contacts, appointments & more.”

Following the notepad metaphor, Springpad allows you to create ‘springpads’ which are pages in a big virtual folio. Springpads which can be collected into folders if you’d like. Each pad can have various information fragments, like notes, lists, events, alarms, and so on. The cool thing about Springpad is that they have devised a way to create more complex pads, designed to handle specific activites, like budgets, recipes, or moving.

Here’s a springpad I created from a blank, and to which I added various elements, like a restaurant in my neighborhood, a budget, a recipe, a contact, an event, and a map that shows all objects on the page:

springpad, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Here’s a springpad that is a Christmas Card Log.

springpad, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

And here’s the calendar from the Personal Organizer section, which demonstrates one of the things that Springpad does well: it collates all the events and alarms from all pads into the personal calendar, and all the to do’s into the to do list, and so on.

It also allows you to add things directly on the calendar. I was also able to have this calendar published to my Google Calendar, too.

springpad, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Where Does It Fall Down?

First of all, the approach to sharing is very limited. Basically, you can share the URL of a page with others, but it doesn’t lead to a shared Springpad, but just a copy of it. That’s no good for me.

Second, there is no way to make your own complex Springpads. While they offer a long long list of Springpads, there is always something specific you’d like to do that isn’t covered.

Third, I think 37signals is headed in a productive direction with the recent additions of Newsroom and Journal (although why they don’t collapse them into one stream, I don’t know). I would like to have an equivalent sort of shared dialog in any organizer. I guess basically I am saying that I don’t want an organizer that is strictly personal, even if I manage a lot of things that I don’t share at all.

Fourth, there is no basic table element, nor anyway to represent a table in their notes object (they don’t support Textile or HTML like Backpack). This means that all the music I manage — chords and lyrics — won’t nicely align. I would like to be able to add a tabel with a column for every measure in the song, for example. Here’s a song pasted from Backpack:

springpad, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The nice folks at Springpad have responded to some of my feedback, and say that things are coming that might make me happy, but in the meantime I will have to stick with Backpack.