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.

Awesome work. I love it.

You guys are out of control! AMAZING !

Wow, looks great.

This actually seems to solve a couple of the problems that I’ve heard people complain about in the past… mainly the inability to easily reorder things.

Quite spiffy!

Yeah so I want to rearrange my neighbors… put the annoying ones with the yappy dog on the other side of my house so I don’t have to hear them in the morning. Can I borrow some 37s talent for, say, a few hours and have them put that together for me?

Super dope drag and drop. That’s gonna be a good one!

p.s. The audio in that demo could be louder.

Great. I was waiting for this feature.

Thumbs up.

Hurray! The restriction to adjacent lists for reordering list items was always frustrating, so it’s great that’s going away. Thanks guys.

That is very cool!

Very cool indeed!

Looks very slick. Well done, guys.

Holy draggin’ Batman!

wow, screencast looks signalizing!

I’m so excited I’m giddy. Excellent.

Nice, might have to get back into using Backpack.

Sick. Utterly sick. =)

fiddly improvements:

1) clean up the drop shadows on the page area. They have hard edges, – jarring!

2) removing writeboards has different vernacular for their deletion, the text strign ‘remove’, while everything else has a trash can icon.

Ah, – ‘remove’ removes the link from the page, but the writeboard lives on, while the delete icon actually deletes… nevermind :)

Holy crapoli! Nice work!

I love 37 signals.

You’ve made it about 5x easier for me to manage all my girl friends and dates via back pack.

Thanks for the hard work that you do which makes it easy for players like me to keep doing what we do best.

Hey, pimp’n aint easy. But it is easier with backpack!

What are you using for the Flash player? Home-rolled or something open source?

Thanks for this great updates!

Did you consider optional columns? Too messy? I like the flexible layout of, say, Netvibes, with columns and tabs.

Come to think of it, their auto-recognition of links saves lots of time, too.

Fred,

37signals doesn’t take customer suggestions (they usually do, add a “thank you”, and never look at it again). They pretty much do what they want from what I’ve seen.

But these new additions are pretty good. I like.

Backpack isn’t about packing as much information on the screen as possible. It’s about making clean pages you read from top to bottom once.

besides, they give you enough pages to organize with anyway.

Beautiful update, can’t wait for it to be released!

bravo! I was JUST yesterday considering whether or not I would stay a Backpack subscriber or make the big switch over to Google (Notebook, Calendar, Writely, et. al.) I wanted to say with you guys, but some of their feature-set was alluring. I think that now that I know a new Backpack is coming, I’m gonna stick around. I’ve always loved it, and these improvements are looking GREAT !! Keep up the good work.

The video looks interesting and it looks like an alright feature. But is it really needed?

Have I become conditioned soooo much by 37signals’ “simple” philosophy to think that this new feature is really not needed.

That looks shit cool, nice work. Can I ask an fickle question and genuine one.

Fickle: What happens if you drop a list item in the middle of a paragraph?

Genuine Does anyone else out there wonder whether they should be using BackPack or BaseCamp for a task? Is there a general rule? Something like…

if ($needs <= blah) then BackPack else BaseCamp;

You guys always seem to come up with the absolute best and easiest ways to solve problems. Everything in this little demo looks amazing and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. I’ve been waiting some time for some updates to Backpack, and boy this made my day!

Looks awesome. With all the time spent on making backpack better, I hope a little love was shown to repeating calendar events. ;)

I have been silently wishing for a feature like this, can’t wait. Hope you bring it to Basecamp next though. Thanks.

Love this new update!!! Looking forward to trying it out

I rate everything on a scale of how much I wish I’d done it first.

I REALLY wish I’d done this first.

Good job.

You bastards.

Have you guys just given up completely on Sunrise? It has been a year since that announcement was made.

Great stuff. I use backpack every day and look forward to the release.

One thing I particularly like is the attempted standardization of the “drag” icon. Maybe the crosshairs icon is the new feed icon?

Re: Backpack vs. Basecamp.

I use Backpack for projects that involve less than 6 or fewer people, and when there’s mutual trust that nobody is going to accidentally trash things.

For me, this is most projects.

I use backpack and basecamp.

And both have different edit icons for each of items. Basecamp has “edit | delete” while backpack is “delete | edit”. It confused me.

Can’t you make it consistent?

Jason,

GREAT ! How Exciting!

You might want to think about posting this information on this page: http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives…

As it seems like people are still commenting on it. That’s where I go to look for information on it.

—Clay

In response to Derrick, who thought this was a move away from simple: it’s actually a move towards simple—notice how you no longer have the “stop reordering” button which was awkward.

There’s a great Steve Jobs quote about this in a recent interview (yes, the “put it in her ear” one):

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”

I love all the drag & drop. When DHTML became popular in 1999, the multiple floating layers possibilities seemed endless but also disorienting and a pain to code. You guys have obviously thought & worked hard to make it all usable here. This looks like a beautiful mac application rather than a web page!

BTW the photo gallery drag & drop was really neat. Can you guys build a separate photo gallery site with that interface? I’d love to put up my vacation photos w/ an uploader and then drag & drop them into place. Maybe some way to directly add titles to them would be neat as well.

This is great guys! It is just the thing to get me excited about using backpack again…

Awesome. You guys never cease to amaze. It’s one of those simple “uh-duh” things. I know backpack is paid and tadalist is free. So opportunity cost doesn’t allow you to work with tadalist that much.

I use basecamp for almost everything except my personal to do list. I use tada for that. It’s simple and I don’t need any of the extra backpack features (yet at least). I use a greasemonkey script that allows you to move back and forth between lists. I love this little feature but unfortunately you have to install a firefox plugin to have it.

The only request that I hope people are making for tadalist whenever they get around to it…. is being able to see all to do lists at once as a view option not the only option and to be able to drag items between lists. Also, to integrate into the site what the greasemonkey script is doing.

Hopefully this backpack code will get used in tadalist sooner rather then later. :-)

Thanks for the new backpack feature – that was the single best usability tweak you could have made – good choice!

We weren’t happy with the original version so we threw it all out. It was too complex. So that set us back, but it was a good set back.

I love you guys, so no offense, but this type of thing is exactly why some of us seasoned vets find it so hard to follow your “no specs”, “Getting Real”, “what worked one time last year for our one big web app should work for you” philosphy.

some of us seasoned vets find it so hard to follow your “no specs”, “Getting Real”

oh right, because enterprise spec’d software always turns out exactly how you expected it to, right?

Too bad Mr. Show isn’t around any longer, ‘cause I can see it now… Backpack: The Movie “Man, I dragged the shit out of that list!”

Any chance there’s also updates to the calendar? I’m sure a lot of people would find repeating events, end times for events, and the ability to set the start day of the week to Monday or Sunday.

LIKE THAT The sooner the better Me glad :)

I think products like Basecamp are great because the interface is so polished and simple, and as the marketing page points out it could be used for anything from a wiki, to a featherweight CRM system, to a wedding planner, to a simple photo gallery, to whatever else you can think of.

I’ve had related ideas where the basic functionality is simple but allows for a wide variety of uses. The question that comes to mind is, how do you avoid making the user feel like “OK, this looks cool, but now what do I do [with this web app]?” I know a helpful green field/starting out page like Basecamp has helps. I guess I’m not entirely sure I can think like a typical user because I’ve been programming for so long that I can navigate through poor interfaces. I basically have no life and sit in front of a computer all day so I have a hard time thinking like someone who actually does have a life and concerns that don’t involve computers or technology in any way.

Some of the ideas I’ve had involve using sophisticated algorithms (not business logic, algorithms)—e.g., a super-simple data mining application. The output of these algorithms is simple to understand (e.g., a list of grouped items) but their internal workings would almost surely be a mystery to nearly all the users (I have an idea of how I think I could build something like Google News but I’m sure most people who visit it don’t). My question is, if you included something like that in an application, would not knowing how the application is doing what it does make them feel like they’re not in control?

simply_excellent = Basecamp.new(:keyword => ‘simple)

What can I say? I read “Getting Real” and you guys even followed your design tenets when writing the book. Each page was a testament to your credo.

Basecamp did not need much, but hats off to finding the one thing that really makes it more usable, but not more cluttered. Thanks for your excellent design patterns! (I rip them off all the time ;-)

Thanks for this great updates!

Yes, very great !

Who is deleted my comment ?

Sorry, error :)