We recommend this tool
May
7
Backpack is a web-based personal information manager. It loads faster than iCal launches, has more features than Stickies, and a full year’s basic subscription is one-quarter the price of a PDA. It manages to replace all of these while being almost, but not quite, entirely unlike any of them. 1
Khoi Vinh describes it as “the most convincing Web answer yet to the simplicity of a spiral bound notebook,” and I think that’s the best description I’ve heard so far. The spiral-bound notebook—or, more honestly, bits of paper strategically placed where I hope I’ll happen upon them during the course of the day—has always been my preferred means of keeping track of the minutiae of my daily existence. I tried a PDA, but it was bulky, a constant uphill battle with Graffiti, and probably a little overkill. Stickies and iCal don’t help when I’ve wandered away from my computer.
Enter Backpack. The interface is deceptively simple, the structure is very flexible, and the application itself never gets in your way. In the developers’ own words:
Most information management tools are riddled with mandatory fields, complex multi-step processes, and specialized “buckets” for data. “Simplify your life in 32 easy steps! Just fill out these 64 fields!” Yeah, right. Backpack adjusts to organize things your way. It’s a blank slate that offers you less structure and more space. Easily fill your pages with anything you want, from notes to to-do lists to images to files. And then group them however you want, wherever you want. It’s organization the way you want it.
Setting a reminder, for instance, doesn’t require you to pinpoint an exact date and time. A drop-down menu gives you options like “Tomorrow morning” and “In a couple of days.” Add the ability to text message your phone when reminders are due, and you’ve got the first information manager I’ve used that beats the spiral notebook.
From a technical standpoint, Backpack is executed brilliantly. The interface is snappy, attractive, 2 and has just the right mix of JavaScript magic and phoning home to the server. (I hate web forms that force you to reload the page for every minor change.) All the pages are almost valid XHTML, render quickly, and even make use of print stylesheets. Backpack also saves the state of your last session; if you follow a link to your Backpack home page, it will redirect you to the last page you viewed before leaving. Nice touch.
My only gripe is that Backpack prefers Textile to Markdown. Both are tools for converting plain text to HTML, but I find Markdown syntax to be more intuitive. Textile gives you finer control over the output, but if I wanted to think about that sort of thing I’d write in HTML to begin with (which, incidentally, Backpack allows you to do). While Textile seems to just convert Textile markup to HTML markup, Markdown takes text that looks much more ordinary and takes care of the tagging on its own. Backpack does support both Markdown and Textile syntaxes, but Textile takes precedence in case of a conflict. I find that conflicts occur fairly often, and so I usually give in and write in Textile, or convert Markdown-formatted text to HTML on my own. Not the end of the world, but an option to choose between the two would be nice.
That said, you really have to use Backpack before you can appreciate it. Give it a shot—there’s a free account that’s a little limited, but still very useful.
1 Hitchhiker’s Guide reference, anyone? ↑
2 Maybe too attractive—when you upload a file, it uses an icon that’s identical to the one OS X uses. Can they do that? ↑
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