Backpack Newsroom

by Stowe Boyd, Reston

I have recently started to use Backpack again, motivated by an inchoate desire to get organized, and the apparent death-by-OS-upgrade of the Sidenote app I have been using for years to keep track of all sorts of junk. It just doesn’t work reliably with Leopard, so I had to let it go.

I use Packrat on the desktop to sync with Backpack, which has to be done manually. But it means I can work offline so long as I remember to sync before disconnecting.

I noted that 37 Signals announced a bunch of new features for Backpack. In their usual siloed way, the guys at 37 Signals have rolled out a new tab called Newsroom in Backpack, which displays a stream of updates: new folks being invited to share, new posts, new to-dos, whatever.

Backpack: Newsroom, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I just don’t like the yet-another-tab approach to providing functionality: it leads to a non-integrated style that can be truly annoying. The worst offender might be the way that Writeboards feel like a totally different app. Why can’t I create a writeboard right on a Backpack (or Basecamp) page? Or at least a link to one?

But the Newsroom works, marginally, as a separate tab, although I would rather it was integrated into the main display area of Backpack. Best of all would be a new version of Packrat that automatically synched every 10 minutes or so and displayed the Newsroom updates.