37signals Product Blog

Reviews of over 25 Mac and iPhone apps designed to work with 37signals products

Check it out: MacAppStorm has posted a great piece on "The Ultimate Collection of 37signals Mac & iPhone Apps." It offers summaries and reviews of over 25 Mac and iPhone apps designed to work alongside Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise.

New Highrise Extras and Add Ons page

Highrise works with a variety of third-party customer service applications, accounting software, data visualization tools, mobile solutions, and more. We recently revamped the Highrise marketing site and now there's a page specifically devoted to add-ons and extras.

Software developers can create extras and add-ons with the Highrise API.

Newsberry, a service to send and track email newsletters, integrates with Highrise

Want to send out an email newsletter to your contacts in Highrise? Check out Newsberry, a service to send and track email newsletters that syncs with Highrise. "Highrise integration" [Newsberry Help section] offers more details.

With Highrise Sync enabled, Newsberry will automatically sync contacts in Highrise to subscribers in your list. All changes in your Highrise account will be visible in your Newsberry contacts list in which you enabled Highrise Sync...

If you check "Enable Highrise syncing" checkbox and click the "Sync accounts" button, your contacts list will be synchronized with Highrise. If any information is updated within your Highrise account (contacts added, updated or deleted) the updates would be visible in your Newsberry list (in approximately 3 hours). After syncing, you will be redirected to a page where you can manage subscribers and you will see the Highrise contacts and regular contacts.

Highrise contacts are marked with the Highrise icon and cannot be edited. You will see a note that Highrise syncing is enabled next to the green icon.

Learn more about how Newsberry integrates with Highrise at the Newsberry help section or read the Newsberry blog post announcing the integration.

Periscope Gadget: "Basecamp control on iGoogle & in GMail too"

Periscope Gadget gives you control over multiple Basecamp accounts on your iGoogle homepage, directly in GMail, on your Windows Desktop with Google Gadgets and even on your iPhone.

I really needed (and wanted) a simple way to punch-in to a project I was busy on; work; then punch-out and write a quick description of what I did. It’s really important to me to charge my clients by the minute: who wants to be charged 1hr of my time for a small copy change that really only took me 4 minutes to do? Enter Periscope.

Learn more about Periscope.

Author uses Highrise to manage contacts (and integrates it with HelpSpot too)

Author Stephane Grenier loves Highrise and writes in to tell us why:

Thank you very much Highrise for making such an amazing product. I'm using it with my assistants to manage the contacts for the marketing of my new best selling book Blog Blazers. Not only does it allow us to manage who's who, we also use it to manage who's been sent books to review, who to follow-up with, and when to follow-up with them. Basically it's a great tool to keep track of our marketing efforts for the book. I can't imagine being without it!

What's also very exciting for us is that we use HelpSpot to manage internal emails, and they've created an integration plugin for Highrise right into their products. So as we email people, we can do what's called a "Live Lookup" right into the software and get the benefits of Highrise with our email client.

So not only are we able to leverage the power of Highrise to manage our contacts, we're also able to leverage the power of their web services!

Thank you to the fine folks at Highrise, I can't imagine launching my book with any other tool!!

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

Timepost, project timer that integrates with Basecamp, now available for both Windows and Mac

Timepost is a project timer that automatically downloads projects and to-dos from Basecamp. Previously available only for Mac OS X, it is now available for Windows too.

"Using Timepost with Basecamp" offers more details:

Basecamp is one of the most popular project collaboration tools on the market, and makes a great companion for Timepost. You can collect timesheets from contractors anywhere in the world using Timepost, and analyze the report information from your Basecamp account.

VisioPlanning for Basecamp: Keep track of projects and employees in real time

VisioPlanning is a tool that integrates with Basecamp and lets you keep track of projects and employees in real time.

Our UNIQUE luminous system allows you to view the evolution of your projects, tasks and employees in real time. A quick glance is all you need to know exactly everything that's going on in your business...

When an employee is working on a certain project, he must keep his interface up to date by activating the flashing light corresponding to the task(s) he is working on. This update is then automatically carried on to the supervisor interface. This way, the supervisor always knows what the employees are working on in real time.

The interaction is very simple. All data kept in Basecamp is automatically transmitted to VisioPlanning's luminous interface and vice versa. None of your data is cached. When you launch VisioPlanning, you allow it to get data from your Basecamp account to transmit it to VisioPlanning's interface.

This video explains more:

Learn more about VisioPlanning.

Propane takes Campfire's immediacy and "turns it up to eleven"

Trevor Squires on why he wrote Propane (coming soon) for Campfire: "Campfire is about immediacy. When you want to share a file, you just upload it. Seen a cool image? Copy in the url and Campfire shows it inline. With Propane I'm trying to take immediacy and turn it up to eleven. In a desktop app I can do stuff that a web app can't do."

When you drag an image from Safari and drop it into Propane, what are you trying to communicate? Sure, Campfire displays the image, but where did it come from? How many times have you been asked "where's that from?". Propane does that for you.



Same thing with text from a web page.

When you copy in a tweet url, why are you doing that? If you want to share the tweet, the actual message is what you meant to share - not some opaque URL. Propane turns it into a twicture because that's what's recognized as a great way to share tweet messages.



How many clicks does it take to upload a file? 3? This is supposed to be immediacy. Just drop the file on Propane.

Stay tuned for more info.

Access Highrise on your BlackBerry using Bridge

Bridge is a subscription based BlackBerry application that "enables synchronization and convenient online and offline access to Highrise."

User interactions are geared towards adding notes and triggering communication with contacts. While full editing and viewing of history etc are available, all interactions were tuned to require the smallest number of user interactions to provide the best user experience possible for a BlackBerry user.

View screenshots of Bridge.

Logbook: Keep your Backpack Journal updated from your Mac menu bar

Logbook is the first product from "Transmission Apps," a group that is building Mac OS companion apps for our products.

Logbook allows you to keep your Backpack Journal updated from your Mac menu bar. You can update your status and log journal entries without having to log into Backpack. Logbook is $12.99.

It's slick and very well executed. We've been using it for a while and it's really encouraged us to keep the journal updated. We're excited to see what other apps they cook up that work with our products.