Thanks for the overwhelmingly positive feedback on the new Backpack! We’re so glad people are really liking it.

We pushed some changes this morning including:

• Longer picture descriptions in the galleries.
• HTML/Textile formatting for picture descriptions
• Better iPhone compatibility (tap an object to reveal the edit/delete links)
• Printing a page looks nice again (we forgot to fix the printer styles when we launched)
• Table borders are back for tables in notes
• A pile of random UI adjustments, improvements, and tweaks
• Fixed a pile of minor bugs including page duplication and home page clearing
• And more.

Additional updates are on the way.

Thanks again for your support.

Any idea when dates will reappear on emails?

Yay, the beta is almost final.
Only, no Textile formatting in my picture descriptions. Doesn’t work.

ep, we’re sorry there were issues with this release, but software development is an imperfect art and science. No matter how diligent you are, some bugs still slip by. This is the unfortunate nature of software.

The best of the best of the best still aren’t perfect. Apple experiences it, Microsoft experiences it, Yahoo experiences it, Google experiences it, Intuit experiences it, Adobe experiences it, etc. These are companies with Q&A departments 5x the size of our entire company. And yet they still release software with bugs.

Luckily we’re quick and can make and deploy changes often. That’s one of the real benefits of web-based software. We can roll out a change within hours and everyone is updated.

Please can you confirm the intended functionality of the search box.

It doesn’t seem to find anything in the body of the page, just text in the page title.

Is this correct or a bug?

theambler, search searches page titles, notes, to-do lists, file names, divider names, and image descriptions. Just about all text on your page is searched.

Note: Search results are updated roughly every 10-20 minutes. Immediate changes to pages aren’t going to be searchable until the index is updated. It’s like Google—a change to your web page won’t show up on Google instantly. Luckily we’re updating the results every 10-20 minutes instead of every few days.

If your issues still continue please email support with specific details. Account URL, page in question, what isn’t being found, etc. The more information you give us the easier we can troubleshoot.

just a little note.
For my account yesterdat he search worked exactly as Jason said.
a search returned link to various pages, a snippet of text of the page with the searched termed marked with yellow.

Today if i perform a search i get no result.
At this moment it appears to function only on email body.. i get links to email containing the searched term.

Jason, I don’t discuss that software development is an imperfect field and I’m not going to discuss again this topic that comes up frequently on the forums.

I only find it obnoxiously rude the way you rule how things are. We must admit that we have a cultural divergence here because on our side of the ocean we see the way you rolled out this update pitiful and rude to loyal paying customers – at least in my surroundings -. You pushed an untested major update out on a tuesday evening (so that you have the night to fix things) and didn’t care less that we were starting our day with your broken tool. Personnally I lost data and had to wait 24 hours to get a partial backup restored. At the time we are speaking some basic things that worked before are still broken.

Software development is an imperfect field, that’s why beta seeding exists. Pushing out an update without seeing the most visible things like borders around tables, list orders or missing print styles is lacking respect to customers who rely closely on your tools. Moreover it’s rude. But you obviously don’t see it like that because every single time it’s the same thing.

For sure over here we love using your products but for sure we trust you less and less. Do you care I’m an unhappy customer? You don’t because you think you’re always right and as long as you have more happy white sheep than unhappy black ones, you’ll continue. So let’s not discuss. Kudos for the update.

I have to agree on the rudeness issue. I just spend 5 minutes deleting about 20 emails that dropped into the top of a project page by a client. If I have to do this for every client on my list it will be a drag. I work on laptop, meaning I have a small window. Now instead of backpack keeping me organized and reducing my workload it is making me do more work. Okay, yes all the items fall on a single project page, but if that page is a mess, what good is that. Really PLEASE RETURN THE EMAIL AREA FUNCTIONALITY SO THAT THINGS FALL INTO THEIR PROPER AREAS, OR AT LEAST LET ME TOGGLE THAT FEATURE.

Jason, I have the same issue re search. I can search on page titles and tags, but not on notes or to-do lists. Also, Textile formatting is not appearing the way it should. h1 is smaller than h2, and the double-quotation mark image that used to appear arund blockquotes no longer is there.

ep, I’m sorry to hear you find our development process and roll-out “rude”. There’s certainly no intentions to be rude, merely to provide the most value to the most customers as fast as possible.

Hosted services definitely exist in a different environment than desktop software. It means you can get major updates and fixes pushed out fast and to all customers, but it also means that sometimes bugs slip through and have to be fixed in the wild. That’s the trade-off of how hosted software like ours works.

It sounds like that trade-off might be rubbing you the wrong way. That’s completely understable. Hosted software is perhaps not a great fit for everyone. We’ve had a lot of incredibly positive response to this update, though, and we’re working as fast as we can to deal with any issues that have popped up as part of this massive roll-out.

We continue to strive to deliver great software fast and as trouble free as we can. But if the occassional bugs that are bound to creep in during these upgrades are completely unacceptable to you, I’d consider thinking about how perhaps a desktop product where you control the upgrade cycle could work better for you.

Jason—

Thank you once again for a great product. I do appreciate the improvements, especially the ability to move everything around the page and between pages, but… (you knew that was coming, right?)

It’s very annoying that the content on all my pages has been re-ordered, so that lists are at the bottom and notes at the top. Was this intentional? Since I use Backpack for list making first, and notes/file management etc. as a secondary function, I will have to manually go through all my pages and reorder items. This is a pain and I don’t understand why I have to do this—why would you not by default leave my data as is, and let me re-order if I wish? If it’s a bug, is a fix planned?

Thank you again for all your efforts on this.

Jason:

Seems to me like your Q&A Department is huge. It just happens to pay to use the product. :) Keep up the great work!

James, we apologize for the reordering of your content. It was a mistake that we couldn’t reasonably repair automatically after making the huge data migration. And now that many people have taken a few minutes to reorder their own pages, going in and automatically reordering them again wouldn’t be a prudent approach.

If you’d like me to manually reorder your pages by hand I’d be happy to do so. You’ll need to give me your login credentials so I can log in as you and drag things around. Of course you’d also need to tell me exactly how you want things, which would probably take longer than you doing it on your own, but if you’d feel better if I did it I’ll be happy to do it. ;)

Just let me know.

David, in french we say: langue de bois.
You’re ready to get in to politics!
I love it how you give lectures at every reply. It’s a 37s pattern.
Of course I don’t need a desktop product. That’s another of your reply patterns to turn people away rather than admit.
There’s definitely a cultural gap you don’t understand and obviously you don’t want to. How sad.

ep, I think compensating for cultural communication differences is almost impossible in the medium of a written public forum.

zenrain, my point is not about the forum.

ep,

you knew the update was on the horizon. do you expect 37 signals to keep the same static programming forever, just to suit your own personal needs? at least think posively about it. this gives you a chance to tweak your site to work the best for you, and to possibly learn something new.

i read your posts, and you just sound whiny to me. i mean “I find it obnoxiously rude the way you rule how things are.” wtf? these guys CREATED the software. They DO rule how things are. deal with it and quit your bitching.

i, for one, really like the changes they have put in place and will learn how to use the software they developed. learning to adapt to changes is really not that big a deal. try it some time. The one who seems not to understand the cultural gap only seems to be you.

b

belladonnaeyes, read again, I love the changes and the products; I use them every day. My point is the way the latest update was rolled out. Of course they created their software and they lead their business as they want, I don’t question that. However they didn’t create MY content and they decided with no prior notice to break it, breaking therefore my workflow.

Like most of you, I hate public betas, but don’t tell me you can’t spend a couple of days testing a release with a small representative group of users who would have pinpointed the most obvious flaws. The result point would have been the same and they would have avoided morons like me legitimally barking on the forum because they lost data, time and money.

If the forums are meant for discussion, I would prefer seeing a constructive one about the interesting topic of building a web app in a multi-cultural world. We all have something to learn by listening to the experiences of everyone. If you think – like many of the wannabes around here – that Chicago is the center of the web, there won’t be much discussion obviously and 37s products won’t evolve at all, if not for an anglo-american audience. If that is it, just say it and don’t take money from customers outside of the US. If not, be respectful about other cultures. It is not that I found the last update attitude to be rude, it was objectively rude from our point of view.

Come on, Ep, it’s what we Americans DO. We exercise cultural imperialism. Our armies invade other countries, our vast corporations inflict repulsive fast food on all the nations of the world, and our small software companies deliberately break the workflows of their overseas customers with insidious upgrades. You see the pattern, don’t you? There couldn’t possibly be any other explanation, could there?—like, for example, a completely revised product having a few unforeseen consequences? Naaah.

There’s only one thing for you to do, so face up to it: you have to boycott McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Halliburton, and 37signals. That’ll strike a blow against tyranny!

Wow

That’s an interesting point ep, although I don’t believe it’s a cultural one. I think no matter the country that the software / web application was designed there are limitations. All software designers try to implement and apply updates and revisions with minimal impact to the customers. However, in the case where the code base is completely rebuilt from the ground up there is no way to do this without impacting the customer data or setup somehow. As undesirable as this is, there is sometimes no way to avoid it if the product is to move forward.

In the traditional desktop application this is mitigated (somewhat) by providing release notes with a warning and explanation of exactly what that will do to the data, and provide steps to get things back to a similar setup in the new program. It also allows the IT department to schedule, plan and implement the changes. However, in a web application there is no way to do this, or no financially viable way to move forward with a test server or two systems at once. There is also no way to allow the customer to schedule time to make changes at a point that is convenient for them. This is the downside of a web application. Applying updates and pre-testing updates is out of the question on the customers end.

While the way 37Signals implemented the update may seem to fit in to the typical stereotype of the bullheaded or rude American attitude from another culture’s standpoint (and I’m not saying that this is a valid stereotype, or trying to defend the cultural bigotry of holding a stereotype towards any nationality), I believe it is actually a web-software limitation.

Could there have been more communication offered by 37Signals over the affects of the upcoming changes? Certainly. Would it have helped anyone, or caused more trouble than just implementing it? I’m not sure. However, I do know that starting out with the bad instead of a good before a new software update can create a negative perception that often causes more harm than good.

zenrain, I understand your point, thanks. Only, I would like someone to explain to me how it works. Obviously the new version of a web app must exist on a development or a test server. Why then can’t this be tested by selected people outside of the company? 37s spent the first days after the release fixing bugs that were for some, as visible as a nose on a face. What’s the point of rushing the release when they’ll end up fixing the bugs anyway. I don’t agree that this is a web-software limitation.

It’s like if I pushed out a layout to one of my customers telling them that I’ll fix the typos when I’ll fix them; I would lose credit and he would lose his time. I may be mistaken, but I have the feeling that developers tend to concentrate more on the container than the content. The content is the only reason for a webapp to live so it should always be the main concern. DHH said himself: data loss is completely unacceptable.