Yahoo! Trip Planner wasn't cutting it for Bruce Boughton. So he turned to Backpack to help him plan his trip instead. Full details at "Planning a Trip 2.oh" [Down at Silicon Beach].
Enter Backpack Having tried the domain-specific solution, I re-considered my problem. Although what I was trying to do—plan a multi-city trip—was quite specifc, it was simply an organisation and collaboration problem. There were loads of tools built for collaboration—why not use one? I chose Backpack because it’s a tool I’m familiar with and also because my girlfriend has a Backpack account as well and Backpack allows you to share pages. Looking back now, it’s the obvious solution—just look at the name.Anyway, I set up a page for my trip and starting adding notes. What I hadn’t realised is that since I last used Backpack (a few months ago), 37signals have beefed up the page components. My planning fell into natural sections: flight to Toronto, hotel in Toronto, flight to New York, hotel in New York, flight from New York, and flight from Toronto. I wanted to keep these distinct but also on the same page. To do this, I used a new Backpack feature: dividers.
Dividers are a great way to organise a page into sections. Each divider can have a title, or you can have a simple line if you’d prefer. I created a divider for each section.
Next I added notes for each small nugget of information (e.g. Air Canada flights on Monday or details of a hotel) and dragged it into the right section. I chose notes so that I could build up the information progressively and re-order items based on how good I felt they were.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
