Backpack

I was lucky enough to receive a a ‘golden ticket’ to preview Backpack. I spent a few days deciding if it was going to work for me. I’d tried using a wiki for my personal information manager, I’d also tried Basecamp, Text Files & pieces of paper. Nothing quite fit. Backpack does!

I was lucky enough to receive a a ‘golden ticket’ to preview Backpack. I spent a few days deciding if it was going to work for me. I’d tried using a wiki for my personal information manager, I’d also tried Basecamp, Text Files & pieces of paper. Nothing quite fit.

Backpack was different, it’s close enough to a wiki for me to like it, but with nice integration of todo lists and file uploads. But what was really the killer feature for me was the ability to email items into my backpack pages. Just like Jason, despite the spam I receive, email is the most important tool I have available. I upgraded to a paid account the day backpack launched.

I shared Russell Beattie’s disappointment that I couldn’t use my Nokia 6600 to work with Backpack. As crummy as the ‘internet on mobile phones’ is, I have my phone with me at all times and being able to add todo items and notes is critical. Now even that’s not a problem , mobile backpack has nice, simple UI and contains all the information I need when I’m on-the-go.

There are a few features I would like added, but they’re not major ones. At present you can’t email a reminder into the system, nor is there a simple javascript ‘popup’ notifier ala Tasks. Those two enchancements would triple the value of those features to me. Jason tells me that the ‘email reminder’ is coming, and I’m sure that when the API’s released I can add the popup stuff myself.

Finally it would be nice to have a single page which shows all my ‘top’ todo items across all my pages. I could set that page as my homepage and spend less of my spare time playing Counter Strike and idling on IRC.