37signals, the cool cats responsible for Basecamp have finally released their next big thing and damn it is cool. It is not going to cure cancer or anything but it certainly is a nice organizational tool. It’s simplicity in design has lead to a really intuitive UI. Good job guys. Anyway I am sharing a few pages for some ongoing projects (in the GTD sense) you can see them here and here. Essentially what backpack allows its users to do is to create webpages to hold information for projects/lists/stories/etc. It could be used as a blog, an interface for simple CRM, a management tool for simple projects, a whole lot of other things.
This is another Ruby on Rails implementation that shows (me at least) how good development tools and smart developers can make something really elegant in a short period of time. The ease of adding widgets to my own backpack webpages is fantastic and I am really excited about using Backpack for some needed life project management. And I am hoping it will push me into learning more about Rails development.
It has been stated by some that the future of web develpment is going to be with this type of framework. I could not agree more. Now it is certainly debatable whether or not these frameworks will be written in Ruby (mmm Ruby) or Java (mmm Java) or something else. I myself am a total web development noob so I have to learn as I go and see for myself.
Simpify
May 3rd, 2005 at 2:45 pm
Rails is definately cool. If you haven’t played with it you should. It is quite informative to see the meta-programming built into Rails. It will make your time in less dynamic languages a little more fustrating (consider yourself warned).
> Now it is certainly debatable whether or
> not these frameworks will be written in
> Ruby (mmm Ruby) or Java (mmm Java) or
> something else.
I think it will not be Java. The language is just not maliable enough. You might be able to pull off something similar in Groovy, or some other dynamic language, on top of the JVM, though.
May 11th, 2005 at 9:17 am
Backpack and it’s related packages look marvelous. However, I’m a bit turned off by the levels of subscription and cost. Not that I think the fees are unreasonable but I can see myself locked into a money sink simply because I have data on their servers that I don’t want to delete. For organizational purposes, I stumbled across this cool webapp via Lifehacker:
http://shared.snapgrid.com/gtd_tiddlywiki.html
It has some of the main components I’m looking for and some cool things I didn’t expect. But the killer thing is it’s a single cross-platform .html file that you can save yourself and rsync between machines or web serve yourself.