tap tap tap's John Casasanta creates iPhone apps and recently published a list of tools that help the members of his “virtual” office collaborate in an effective way. He writes, "Out of all the apps and services I use throughout the day, I find myself spending most of my time in Backpack."
37signals’ Backpack has become an invaluable tool for our company. For each of our projects, we have one or more Backpack pages associated with it where we keep various lists and notes for the project. I say “project” versus “app” because we have several things in the works that affect more than one app (like social sharing, for instance).The kinds of information that we store in Backpack are pretty varied. Here are some examples of what we keep in ours:
- to-do lists of features for our upcoming app versions
- bug lists
- brainstormings
- lists of design sessions for each app
- product definitions, specifications, and notes
- app mockups and new feature mockups
...
One of the things I like most about Backpack is its freeform nature and that you can easily adapt it to whichever way works best for you. There are many similar services that try to put too many constraints and restrictions on how you structure your information but with Backpack you have a lot of freedom in this regard. A Backpack page for one of our apps is very unlikely to look like one for another one of our apps and that’s a good thing… the teams are free to organize the information for each project in ways that best suit them and Backpack goes a long way in helping us do that.
Learn more about how tap tap tap uses Backpack and other tools.
