Quick thoughts on Backpack for personal productivity

I started using Backpack when I noticed that my friend and former Salon.com colleague Scott Rosenberg commented on it recently. I hadn't paid Backpack much attention until Scott mentioned it, and since I recall Scott being a heavy user and evaluator of such applications (especially Ecco Pro), I thought I would check it out. (Yes, it's from the same folks who brought us Basecamp).

Backpack is not just a piece of web-based software. It has the makings of a movement with its spirited manifesto and gushing adherents ("I want to marry it," says one user on the manifesto page). This is not a criticism -- just the opposite. Getting people excited about software is a lost art, and this kind of loving devotion is what all software developers should be shooting for.

Backpack organizes your life in terms of pages, which they describe this way: A page is a collection of any combination of text, to-do lists, images, or files. Some ideas for pages include "My trip to Paris" or "Furniture I eventually want to buy" or "Things I want to do this summer" or "My favorite quotes" or "Ideas for the bathroom renovation" or "People we need to interview for the job.". For me, the mix of structured and unstructured information in Backpack more closely mirrors the makeup of my own cluttered human brain than anything I've used -- at least so far. Like many of you, I tend to get hot and bothered about new technologies (note to self: remember your brief Groove obsession!), so to some degree, I need to wait and see how things look a month from now.

That being said, this one feels right already. I think in terms of things, not functions, which has made my past efforts of getting organized a little frustrating. Think about how Palm OS is designed, for example. If you want to make a to-do list, you can use the Tasks app. If you want to make some free-form notes, you use Memos. Everything is in its own silo based on what app it will fit into, not on how you need to reference the information in context. In Backpack, I just create a page around a particular thing I'm working on, which I did recently when I was hosting a 4th of July barbeque. I made a shopping list on my "4th of July barbeque" page using the List function and used the Notes function to enter recipes. The interface leverages the AJAX approach nicely, making entering information easy and fast.

The clincher for me, though, was Backpack Mobile, a stripped-down web interface that leaves the AJAX behind but works really well on the web browser on my Treo. I like keeping all of my information centrally stored online, and I'm ok with depending on a solid GPRS connection to get to that information, despite the obvious risks. When I went shopping for my barbeque recently, I used Backpack Mobile to check items off my list and reference the recipes I had loaded. I didn't have to do any hot synching with my Treo when I got home after shopping to update my PC (I am the type of guy who hot syncs less often than he should). In the mobile age, this is what "cross-platform" really means -- think beyond the "does it work on a Mac?" discussion (though it should, of course), because it's got to work on a mobile device to really be useful.

Backpack is simple, but is loaded with features and capabilities like their API (a very nice touch) and e-mail/mobile reminders. It's probably not for everybody, but I'm liking it.