We just pushed an update that includes a long top-requested feature: A calendar date picker for milestones.

Now when you add a new milestone, or edit an existing milestone, you pick the date from a calendar instead of a series of pulldown menus.

Today’s date is in light yellow for reference. The date you select is highlighted in black and repeated at the bottom of the calendar. You can move through the calendar quickly using the back/forward arrows or jump to any month/year up to 3 years in advance with a single pulldown menu.

We hope you find the calendar date picker useful. We’re really happy with it. Thanks for your continued support.

Oh… If you dig Basecamp we’d love if you’ve Vote for Basecamp in the Webware 100. Thanks again for your support!

Awesome job, 37Signals. You continue to amaze, and thank you for listening to the users.

Much easier to use than the drop-down lists. Thanks.

Been waiting for this for a while. Great work.

One question: I’m wondering why the calendars on highrise and BC are done so differently?

YESSS!!!!! Victory! (Anyone watch entourage?) heehee

This is a two sided improvement.
It’s very useful to pick the right date. Wonderful. Much better than before.
On the other hand you (maybe without intention) removed the tiny calendars on the right column an so you’ve got no means to look for maybe the next month or your previous or upcoming milestones. So you are left alone, if you like to put a milestone say in between two existing ones.

Can’t you provide the tiny calendars with the yellow marked dates like on the main milestones page? That would make the point. Otherwise I have to pick a date in my mind before clicking in “new milestone” and enter that date in the new (wonderful) calendar. But then it’s no help in comparison to beforehand…

Thanks for your continuous work!

Awesome!!!

Magnus: We are considering on plotting existing milestones on the date picker so you’ll have additional context when selecting a date. We just didn’t want to hold up release of the date picker because of that feature. But we are looking into it.

Can’t you provide the tiny calendars with the yellow marked dates like on the main milestones page?

+1

Even if these are not plotted on the picker – just placing this in the empty right hand sidebar would be great

I miss the ability to shift future milestone dates. Will this feature return?

I miss the ability to shift future milestone dates. Will this feature return?

This feature hasn’t been working right for a while so we decided to pull it for now. We’ll work on making it better and then reintroduce it at a later date.

Re: This feature hasn’t been working right for a while so we decided to pull it for now. We’ll work on making it better and then reintroduce it at a later date.

Please make this sooner rather than later – I have several clients who are terminally late on their milestones and I use this feature on an almost-daily basis. Moving 10 to 20 milestones manually will be a huge time suck.

Ironically, I was singing the praises of this feature to my business partner just yesterday. That’ll teach me.

Well done guys! This is an excellent enhancement. I love the little adjustments you guys have made over the past few weeks. Just subtle changes to make the overall experience much better. Thanks again.

Danad, we’ll be looking into it again soon. Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

The loss of the “shift future milestones” is a HORRIBLE loss for us! As danad said, we too use this feature on a daily, if not hourly basis!!! Without it, Basecamp has suddenly become terribly complicated and time consuming. :-(

Much better but, how come the mini calenders on the right start on Monday (which I prefer) but the new one starts Sunday? Bit confusing?

Nice work. Strange that the calendar format is inconsistent.

Is there a reason for this?

+1 to the above 2 posts…

Are you guys talking about this inconsistency?

Maybe they started outsourcing and the contractors aren’t talking to each other.

Michael, I get the reason for the top ‘inconsistency” as it changes based on the day it is viewed. It is a contextual forward plan of the next 14 days.

It’s the bottom two that I don’t get.
Why would they need to be different?
Even the days are presented using different abbreviations.

It seems like the calendar control do not take in to account international differences. I’m thinking about what is the first day of the week. I know US has Sunday as the first day of week, but a lot of European countries (including mine) have Monday. Having a visual on this actually confuses the user when it’s not correct. I have already notified my team of a milestone with the wrong date.

I would rather go back to the old interface than keeping the new interface. The best would be if it would be correct. You could easily get the information from the user agent string or add a country setting.

Thanks,

Maybe they started outsourcing and the contractors aren’t talking to each other.

You can toss this conspiracy theory out with the rest of them. We don’t contract out design or development. The same people who designed Basecamp on day one are the same people designing Basecamp today.

The small calendars in question above are different because they were built at different times (about 2 years apart), styled differently with different CSS, and contain entirely different code to render and make them work.

They also serve different purposes: One is for interacting with (you can move through months, change the month/year, select a day, etc) and one is simply for display. One shows only one month at a time and the other is a stack of calendars. One is a secondary item in the sidebar and one is a required item when creating a new Milestone. That being said, we will bring their look and feel closer together in due time.

Re: Shift subsequent… We should have this back in just a few days. Hang tight and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.

I’m afraid I agree with those who find the inconsistent start day for the week quite confusing. Ideally the calendar view should be localizable to Sun…Sat or Mon…Sun as Helgeh suggests, but even if you decide for simplicity’s sake to settle on the American or European standard, it should be consistent across all views.

People are accustomed to taking in a tabular calendar at a glance and to use different conventions within the same system is a usability no-no. At best it requires users to stop and think, at worst it causes them to make mistakes and miss deadlines.

(On the other hand I don’t think it’s a problem that the two calendars use different fonts and colors. I didn’t even notice.)

The same people who designed Basecamp on day one are the same people designing Basecamp today.

I’ll take you at your word but from my perspective the makeover activity of late, especially aesthetic deviations, suggests otherwise. Of course, designing and coding are different activities.

PS: I like the new calendar, can’t wait until it finds its way to To-Dos and the Meeting scheduler.

+ 1 for having the calendar date picker + RHS mini milestone view starting on the same day.

Love the implementation though, big ups.