This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

Yeah!

Excellent! More features now please. There are too many companies doing what you do to not invest in your own product. Basecamp could use a facelift, it’s a bit dated, my friends!

Great! Was just thinking how useful this would be the other day, when I accidentally closed the wrong browser window and had to rewrite my Highrise note.

Very nice update guys. Good work!

That is great news. Basecamp rocks.

Thanks guys, makes me happy to see you are always making improvements.

Would love to see some type of visual calendar for upcoming tasks!

Merci c’était très attendu!

Ah ha! That explains why that comment seemed to stick around. This happened before today?!

Good job. Thanks.

And the heavens rejoiced! Finally!

First, with the recent “Undos”, now “Auto Saves”...it’s like Christmas. After years it appeared 37Signals disregarded the needs of it’s modern user, but that all appears to be changing and the most dramatic changes most sure to come in Basecamp 2.0 announced released as Basecamp Next. Thank you guys!

Bravo! This is a much needed improvement. Thanks for making it happen.

About time! ;)

@Mat: Not sure if you’ve been paying attention but they have Basecamp Next coming shortly.

great feature – how about a little visual feedback when the autosave happens so we know its saved, wordpress and google docs do this pretty well

I just got someone else’s half-written message when I clicked on “Post a new message”. It was definitely written by someone else on the same project.

Possible? Or am I going mad?

This is a nice addition to a great service. I have always been paranoid when writing long notes in Highrise (or any other website) and I made it a habit to CTRL +A CTRL +C to make sure I didn’t lose data. This new feature will make Highrise even better. Continue the innovation!

WHOOT !

This is awesome, I always lose my half way-written notes when I am at places with spotty internet

Nice! — Especially because we don’t have to learn anything. It just works.

Thanks for listening and making it happen. ; )

@37signals

How is this actually implemented? Is the data just stored in the session cookie? (If so, why would this only work with recent browsers then?)

Is it using HTML5 ?

THANK YOU ! I don’t know how many times I’ve lost a note I was typing in because of something stupid like this. This is a great addition! You guys rock!

Perfect. I’ve copied every message before posting for years because of the one or two times I’ve lost it :).

Avin

I’m guessing if you have the AutoSave extension for Chrome, now would be a good time to disable that.

Thanks. Another minor but very important update. I have lost messages so many times that I have actually gotten better at typing.

YAY , thank you!! I can’t count the number of times I’ve lost a message before having a chance to post it…

Good job, 37signals guys! I hope you can extend “AutoSave” feature to other input source like the contact input in Highrise etc. : )

Works in Opera 11.60 as well.

Great. Now, if only there could be a way to upload files in the background or something, so you don’t lose an upload if you navigate away from a window while uploading. This has happened so many times to my client, I have to explain to them that they can’t do anything unless the upload has finished (I personnaly work in many windows just to cirvumvent that problem, but this should work without requiring a workaround).

Great news!! Thank you so much. We’ve needed this many times.

Much appreciated. This has been my one frustration with Basecamp. Glad to see it scratched off the list.

+1 to this comment:

How is this actually implemented?

I’m curious, as well.

WOOHOO ! Thanks.

Thank you Santa – we

Great news! Been waiting for this for years.

Out of curiosity – did you guys already have this in the works, or was this in response to the comments on the undelete announcement? Seemed like autosave was the #1 request in the comments on that post.

That’s really nice – thanks!

Nice one guys, thanks for the upgrade !!

Awesome—this will save me much stress and foul language at work. Thanks guys!

This is a dream come true for me and my fellow co-workers. I accidentally closed my message FOUR times the other day. It was awful!

Thank you! Great improvement!!

Does this not work when editing existing notes (that load via AJAX )? Only for text boxes already on the page when the page first loads? For the life of me i can’t get it to work with existing notes.. but I see where my content is saved for a new note.

Thank you!

Excellent – now I just need to get use to not clicking – add this comment, every couple of minutes.

Cheers,

FP

Thanks, It is really a good stuff!! Keep it up.

I thought this was great. I never thought of using localStorage to keep track of autosave fields before… lightweight and requires no knowledge or strain on the server-side. I wrote a quick implimentation in CoffeeScript… if anyone wants to add it to their own apps:

https://github.com/yyyc514/autosave_coffee

Many thanks for 37signals for the idea and also the default suggestions for how to generate the hash key for large web apps.

Sorry, no auto link here:

https://github.com/yyyc514/autosave_coffee

When posting comments on this blog autosave seems “stuck” in that whenever I return after posting a comment the body of my previous comment is always loaded in the form.

Fantastic addition, particularly for Writeboards. I think this may be enough to switch me from Google Docs (I much prefer the versioning in Writeboards anyway).

Brilliant idea! All we need now, is for the page to drop down when clicking on ‘Read More’ instead of opening a new window. I’m forever losing my place when I do that! Keep up the good work!

How aggressive is the save?’what if power goes out and my iMac flicks off?

Awesome! Finally…

auto save is a g reat improvement…even better would be if the system would ask if you want to save your work. Many times I realize I am putting a note in the wrong place.

How come you’ve never created a blogging platform? it seems like a natural fit for your software to plug right in.

Thank god!!! That was the one big frustration I’ve had with Basecamp, which I otherwise love.

But it would also be great if you could apply this to Internet Explorer 8!

please oh please can the next thing be to be able to message all projects at the same time (via basecamp, without having to email them I mean….....) That would save me hours and hours and hours when I have to send them all the same piece of info and for data protection can’t blanket email (and don’t want to either, I want to be able to use basecamp)

Ta

Lisa

Thank you for this! Can’t tell you how many times I’ve crafted that perfect message for my client and lost it all because of an accidental “Back” button hit or closing of the browser window.

This is a great update! So many times I’ve typed out an hour long message with updates to make and I’ve accidentally deleted the message or the browser cache.

Thank you for the great updates that don’t muddle the functionality but add to the ease of use!

Hooray to that! specially for the writeboards. That should have been introduced ages ago, even if only as a server storage.

EXCELLENT , LOVE YOU GUYS !

woohoo…

bye bye notepad and copy and paste when putting together an important message :)

Sorry to not sound thrilled, but it’s about freakin’ time! This feature was loooong overdue.

SOOOO glad you did this… I have a couple of moments where I wished for this feature…

Many thanks!

Awesome. Thanks guys.

My favorite part, and something we ALL love to hear: “You don’t have to do anything. It just works.”

I’ve lost the threads countless times and changed my habit to typing in textedit first. Most of the times it happened for funny reason that I touched the magic mouse and it sent me to prev page.

This is an absolutely THE MOST DESIRABLE features of all times. I can’t imagine writing the lost comments again and having same impact of message.

Thank you Basecamp for this feature!

Boom! My frustrations have just been eradicated! Lost messages many of time… Great feature! :)

I also hope the issue concerns all help. Thank you very much. Thiết kế logo

Thanks for that guys! That was THE ONE thing I really had to criticise. Thanks for solving that problem. You’re doin’ a grat job :-)

This was my #1 feature request for Basecamp. Thanks so much for implementing it and making a great product even better.

About time!

Thank you; it was definitely a problem and not up the standards of everything else. I feel much better about recommending Basecamp to others now.

Ohhhhh great!!! I just lost a very long message last week, got so pissed off (Safari crash). This is fantastic news!!!

Clever improvement. Thanks.

Yeah! Killer feature.

I’ve had so much pain from loosing POSTs that failed for various reasons. Good work guys.

So glad you implemented this change – can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost work in a tab accidentally closed.