Topic: How are you using Backpack? / Backpack Vs Twine

Has anybody else had any experience using both Twine & Backpack yet? If so what do you think of its merits/pitfalls over Backpack?

I have been using Backpack as a ‘Personal Information Manager’/GTD app/Project support tool for a while now and have found it very useful for structuring large quantities of information. The big limitation for me has been that Tags are assigned at the page level, rather than the item level (such as an individual note, file, etc) make this too course for pages with large quantities of information. For me pages have always just been another type of categorisation (all be it one with the ability to give content an order) and the ability to filter both within and across pages would be a major boon.

I have just started using Twine and they have attacked things from the other end, where everything is very heavily (and primarily auto) tagged, and there is very limited ability to formulate your own structure. They do have a concept similar to pages (Twines) where items (notes, files, etc) are grouped, but unlike pages in Backpack, the items themselves cannot be ordered. The Twines are only a very loose conceptual container and as soon as you start filtering/searching they are largely abandoned, which can be a double end sword, particularly with common terms.

I suppose the bottom line is that I really like Backpack, but I don’t want to scatter my information across what are two, largely similar-on-the-face-of-it, apps. To me Twine is clearly the direction things are heading, but I see no reason why apps like Backpack cannot be infused with ‘semantic technology’, rather than superseded by it.

Anybody else have any thoughts?

Topic: Tips & Tricks / Backpack Gadgets/Widgets

I’ve been looking around for a way to get RSS feeds and del.icio.us bookmarks to display within Backpack pages and I’ve finally found one. Google Mashups [ http://code.google.com/gme/ ] allow you to create a whole range of applications (calendars, RSS feed readers, forms, tabbed sub-pages!, etc, etc) that can be embedded within Backpack notes. Because the pages are hosted by Google you don’t have to worry about executing any javascript, which seems to be the main limiting factor with embedding code with Backpack pages. Once you have created a page on the Google Mashup site you can wrap it in an iFrame within a note on Backpack and the page is rendered as the Backpack page is loaded.