First of all, nice work on the new Backpack. This is very exciting.

One thing that I noticed right away, however, is that Backpack no longer scales to the window size of your browser; it is a constant (very wide) size. Is this intended behaviour? I thought the scaling was rather nice.

Pages in the previous version had a fixed width as well. We did increase the page width in this version by about 200 pixels.

Thanks for the reply—my mistake. The old width did seem more appropriate. On my pages, at least there appears to be quite a lot of empty white space down the right side of the page, just before the sidebar.

As most people, I love the upgrade. The drag everywhere feature really makes it a power tool.

But the extra 200 pixels really seem too much for me. Backpackit is never my primary window on the desktop. I always have it open to quickly find some info or add something fast. It now needs much more screen real estate, making it uncomfortable for quick glances.

Again, I understand this brings the backpackit design in line with the rest of your apps. But windows of both basecamp and highrise are much more loaded with information that your typical backpackit one.

Actually, the page is only about 100px wider, not 200px. We also increased the width of the sidebar to maintain the proper proportions and account for the search field.

Noted. Again, nothing earth shattering. Just personal preference. Thanks for the reply, and congrats on the upgrade.

I’d really, really prefer to have the original size back or to have a fluid/resizable page. I’m finding that even at 10-15% wider than I normally maintain my browser, I’m getting horizontal scroll on certain pages.

It does seem rather too wide to me also. I’m not always working on my wide-screen display.

In fact, one of the most common use cases for me is having to get some tidbit of information out of Backpack at a public computer someplace on campus. Those machines are generally running Windows 98, have a CRT, and are set to 1024×768 or often even 800×600.

To use Backpack on those machines is a very difficult exercise in scrolling around to find the navigation links, scrolling back to find the information, etc, etc.

Most of the time, I do work on a 1024×768 display, and I really prefer the new, wider size.
I don’t think it takes too much horizontal scrolling.

It had always been my impression with the old page layout that it wasted way too much space.
Although the old page layout was more asthetically pleasing, I think this change was a good move.

Would it be difficult to write some custom CSS to override this? On pages with a whole bunch of lists, more than 50% of the frame is white space—looks kind of silly.