[image title=”basecamp” size=”medium” id=”628″ align=”left” linkto=”[site_url]/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/basecamp.png” ]At fxguide/fxphd, we’re used to working from different locations and timezones — it’s been that way for us since day one. After seeing some tweets from one of our members, I thought I’d highlight a couple of web apps that really help make things easier on us: Backpack and Basecamp from 37signals.
My personal fave that we use all the time at fxphd/fxguide is Backpack. It’s a great way to store useful information that is accessible 24×7 to everyone on the team, selected members of the team, or even people who don’t have a Backpack account. Basically you create pages which contain notes, files, todos, pictures, and more. For instance, we have pages where we keep track of what equipment we have sent to what profs at fxphd, lists of VPN software licenses and instructions on how to start/restart the server processes, even a page where we keep track of bugs/feature requests for the fxphd web site…checking them off after they’ve been addressed. But that’s just the start of the possibilites….
With the recently released iPhone app Satchel, this information is at our fingertips even more of the time. I took the afternoon “off” the other day to spend some time in the sun watching a Cubs game at Wrigley field. As usually happens when one is “off”, we had an emergency issue come up on the server that I had to deal with. Instead of being lost without docs or reference, I just logged into Backpack and got the information I needed. Of course, with the crap iPhone 3G AT&T network that was a bit painful, but it got the job done. (As a sidebar to the network issue, I have a laptop card for my MacBook Pro which always works really well…I’m coming to the determination that the iPhone may be more or as much to blame for the “spinning circle lack of network thingy”)
The thing about the 37signals web apps is that they are clean and simple to use. When I first started using them, I often wished for this or that, but over time and becoming a fan of their blog I’ve come to appreciate their design process and why they choose to leave some things out of the mix. Simple is good and bloatware is painful — I truly like the simplicity of what they’ve created.
There is one feature which is truly lacking on their site for a worldwide company such as ours — and that’s time zone support for calendar events. They’ve got this wonderful product for people located in disparate locations, but sharing local dates and times without a bit of hacking is impossible….making the calendar quite useless. I’d actually like to see their take on implementing support for this — I think they’d figure out a way to do this right.
For the Red Dwarf: Back to Earth project, we used Basecamp to centralize communication about the project with our team of artists all over the world. The app provided a valuable repository for discussing information and procedures, to do lists, uploading reference files, and setting milestones. Backpack wasn’t used for managing shots — we felt it wasn’t designed for that task, so we used Shotrunner.
One issue that came up during the production was that itwas natural to ping someone on chat to get some information, but then there would be no record of this. So we signed up for a Campfire account which provides a searchable, integrated web chat — if you weren’t logged on you could sign in and see what you missed in the chat. However, in reality we didn’t use the feature much at all and I actually cancelled the chat account after the trial period. I think much of this had to do with simply breaking old habits….and that Campfire could actually prove quite useful. The timezone features I mentioned earlier also proved a bit of an issue, but we were more concerned with days vs. specific times.