Topic: Feature Requests / 2 and 3 months for Reminder shortcuts

Can you add to reminder time shortcuts – 2 and 3 months.

I’ve found that i need 2/3 months more often than 1 month,

Topic: Feature Requests / Picture gallery requests

Can you make the reordering of photos more smooth. Right now it’s very jumpy (Safari 3.1.1 OS X 10.5.4).

Also, can you also make it so that you can create a new gallery just by dragging one of the pictures from an existing gallery?

Topic: Backpack API / Beginner's guide?

Hi. I’d really like to experiment with the Backpack API to see what fun/useful things I can come up with. But despite reading the Backpack API page I’m still unsure of where to start. More specifically, how and what I should use to interface with the API.

Previously, I’ve done a bit of basic Java OOP, and a few static HTML pages. I don’t consider myself at all a ‘developer’, hence the title of the thread, but with some help I hope to learn how to become one.

Any advice will be gratefully recieved. Thanks.

Topic: Tips & Tricks / Neat way of linking to webpages in backpack

By the way, I use Skitch (Mac software) to do all of this. It’s a breeze.

Topic: Tips & Tricks / Neat way of linking to webpages in backpack

Here’s a method to create a link to a webpage through an icon. like this:

Here’s how I did it:

1. Go to the webpage you want to link to and get a screen shot of the webpage’s icon/badge (obviously crop it and resize it to a smallish size)
2. Upload it to a website online
3. Use the usual backpack method of linking to a webpage, but instead of putting a link name, link to the picture online. e.g.

   "!picture!":website.com

Its just a neat way of reminding you what the website is linking to.

Topic: Feature Requests / Incorporating videos into backpack pages

I’ve found myself wanting to incorporate embedded videos (instead of links to videos) in my backpack project pages more and more. Along with voice notes, notes, links and images, it helps me solve the problem of trying to upload everything I have in my project folders on my desktop into a backpack page.

Thanks. Hope you decide to put it in.

Topic: Feature Requests / Tagging Messages

I’d love to have an elegant implementation of the feature to tag messages too.

Topic: Feature Requests / WYSIWYG editing interface

I wish that I didn’t have to wait until I submit my note before I can see what it will really look like on my page. It’s makes for a oh-man-i-hope-that-this-comes-out-correctly user experience. You don’t ever have to worry about that when you’re writing on pen and paper.

If 37Signals could get it so that I could see straight away what something would look like on my page, I would see that as a major step forward in the user experience. In a perfect world, I would like to never see a text box ever again when creating content on my page – just like paper.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Should uploading a 7MB file take longer than 2 minutes?

I’ve got 6Mbps download connection, 512Mbps upload working connection. Nothing else was using the internet.

FIle was a .dmg file. The size was 7MB. The backpack page wasn’t very big, average size page (like the ones you find on backpack shuffle.

Topic: Feature Requests / Bullet points font size

PLEASE can you make it so that bullet point text is the same font size as normal text?! I thought I could live with it being smaller, but its really starting to get on my nerves. So much so that I’m almost avoiding bullet points just to get normal font size!

Topic: Feature Requests / Make backpack pages load quicker

Small pages obviously load very quickly, but any ‘larger’ sized page takes quite long to load. If they made it quicker, the user experience would be much better in my opinion.

Topic: Feature Requests / Backpack Becoming More of a Business Product

Yes, thank you for considering our needs during your update. Keep up the good work!

Topic: Feature Requests / Backpack Becoming More of a Business Product

I strongly concur. Please keep the same low cost package options for those of us who are pretty happy with what we got already, and don’t want our backpack to be moulded against our will to be a bloated (for us) business product. I want to think less.

Topic: How are you using Backpack? / Personalized shopping mall/ favourite shops

Almost always, when I shop online the scenario is this: I already roughly know what I want in advance, so I use a price comparison engine and finally purchase the item(s) at whichever store has the cheapest price (along with other factors, of course).

But with occasions like Valentines day, I always find it hard to think of good presents to buy for my girlfriend. I don’t know in advance what I want to buy, so I’m mostly looking for inspiration. Specifically, what I want to do is to go into several of my favourite shops and see what great things they have on sale, and find a present that way instead.

So I decided to just create a page which I’ve called My Personal Shopping Mall which is where I’m gonna list all of my, not just favourite shops but also quirky, inspirational shops where I might just buy one thing per year from. So whenever an occasion comes up next, I’m hopefully gonna have a much easier time finding a decent present! And on time too!

I don’t know how many people already have already thought of this (I guess it’s pretty obvious), but I don’t think I’ve read it anywhere so here it is! Good luck and have fun!

p.s. there isn’t much on the page at the moment – I’ve just created it. I’m just gonna add shops as I come across them.

Topic: Feature Requests / Page hierarchy

Man, the more I use backpack the more I want this feature.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, mind mapping and planning on paper. And since I’ve done so, I cannot emphasize enough the power of being able to think and organise horizontally as well as vertically is so much more natural and flexible.

Please, please, please gimme a clean and beautiful way to think horizontally in my precious baby Backpack!

Topic: How are you using Backpack? / Recommendations for Backpack Dashboard widget?

Is there a dashboard widget that just works, and allows the basic features of checking, deleting and reoordering?

Topic: Feature Requests / Links in list titles no longer work

it would make it a lot easier to create something like a contents section by creating a list or note that has links to all the major sections of the page.

Hm, now that I think about it it would be a wonderful feature if bacpack had a function that could automatically generates a ‘sections/contents’ bit at the top of the page for you.

Topic: Feature Requests / Page hierarchy

Probably my most wanted feature.

Topic: Tips & Tricks / iBackpack - Backpack Pages Optimized for iPhone and iPod touch

Justin, the new update has broken the edit feature for me. And is there any way that we can reorder stuff on the page?

Topic: How are you using Backpack? / GTD - Seeing all your next actions in backpack!

Rheuven – this seems to be clearly a problem with Backpack’s fundamental search function. I guess we will have to wait for it to be fixed.

However, in the meantime, I’ve found that by going to the Page(s) (its not normally more than 2) where the search hasn’t revealed the next actions, it somehow rebuilds the search index and Backpack’s search function will then find them all.
It might not work for you, but it’s worth a try.

Topic: Tips & Tricks / iBackpack - Backpack Pages Optimized for iPhone and iPod touch

Well I just tried it out on my iPod Touch and it seems to work great. Quicker than normal backpack, and much easier to add and edit stuff. For large pages (like my home page), it still takes an absolute decade to load it all up on the iPod Touch, but that’s a device fault.

Great work Justin!

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Any way to speed up backpack for large pages?

My home page is quite large, and sometimes it takes ages to load it up. Is there anyway to speed up the loading process?

I’ve got SSL on. Tried it off but it wasn’t noticeably quicker.

Topic: How are you using Backpack? / GTD - Seeing all your next actions in backpack!

I’ve just found the problem with search too – its not always completely accurate. I too hope that this gets fixed soon.

Regarding problems 1 and 2, I have started to implement this solution: Instead of having a list called “Next Actions” with a number of next action items, I have started to prefix each individual next item within the list with NA, which stands for Next Action.

Using this method, bringing up your complete list of next actions merely requires changing your search string from “Next Actions” (without quotes) to “NA”. This should solve problem 1 -since no matter how long your next actions list per project, if every one is tagged, then it’ll bring it up; and problem 2 – since you probably don’t have any other places where you have NA by itself, thus only the relevant matches will be shown.

2 things to note:

1. This may seem cumbersome at first, to prefix all your next actions, but it is more than worth it in my opinion. Plus, it’s only two letters!
2. If you like using Covey’s four quadrant system – Important and Urgent, Important and Not Urgent, Not Important and Urgent, and Not Important and Not Urgent – you can easily extend this by changing the prefixes to NAIU, NAIN, NANU and NANN. This is what I do, since I like to filter by the Urgent stuff and Important stuff.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Is watch topic working for anybody?

Its not for me.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Search function not returning all the matches first time

I’m finding it hard to describe exactly what the problem is.

Basically, when I use the search function, the results page does not return all the matches of the search string.
However, after I’ve clicked on the page that contains the few matches, once I search again the results page returns all the matches.