This version of the page http://www.panoramio.com/blog/basecamp-writeboard/ (0.0.0.0) stored by archive.org.ua. It represents a snapshot of the page as of 2008-08-17. The original page over time could change.
Basecamp + Writeboard at Panoramio

Panoramio's Blog

Basecamp + Writeboard

October 24th, 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela

I said before that 37signals is one of these companies that “get it”. I do not think however that they have got absolutely everything right.

Point in case, they integrated recently their new Writeboard with Basecamp.

For those not in “the known”, Writeboard let’s you manage the life of a document. You can see and compare older versions, see who changed what, etc. Basecamp is a web application to manage your proyects. You can see who has to do what, what has to be done before the next milestone, messages related to the proyect, etc.

Basecamp was structured in several parts. You had:

  1. Messages
  2. To-Do lists
  3. Milestones
  4. People

Now you have a fifth item, Writeboards.

Do you see the problem?

With the arrival of Writeboards we have two different classes of documents: messages and writeboards. What is the difference? You can track the changes to writeboards, and you can not track the changes to messages.

If you are a paying customer, there are zero reasons to use a message instead of a writeboard. Yet they are completely different things in the Basecamp interface.

Coming from a company that strives to make less, this one more tab to make a split that users could not care less about is bugging me.

Filed under: miscellaneous   |  

5 Responses to “Basecamp + Writeboard”  

Feed for this Entry
  1. 1 Mark on Oct 25th, 2005 said:

    I don’t mind that they are separate. Sometimes an all-in-one kitchenmatic that toasts your bread and washes your dishes is not best.

    Learn how to spell “development”.

  2. 2 Joaquín Cuenca Abela on Oct 25th, 2005 said:

    Hi Mark,

    Killing the messages and keeping just writeboards do not need a “more general” interface.

    If the interface of writeboards was more intrusive, I would have some concerns about merging these two kind of messages. But given how well it handles the use-cases of its little brother I think they can safely remove the messages and leave only writeboards.

  3. 3 David Heinemeier Hansson on Oct 26th, 2005 said:

    Thanks for the kind words. But Writeboards are certainly not able to replace messages. Their purpose is entirely different. Messages provide a low-barrier way to communicate about the status of a project. They’re displayed like a weblog, showing multiple entries at once, and available in different categories. And there’s significantly less mental overhead involved with creating a new message than a new Writeboard. Oh, and they can have files attached.

    Writeboards, on the other hand, is for longer, more stable pieces of text in need of collaboration from multiple parties. The focus is on highlighting differences between versions and to give amble room for pages of content. Very different scope and application than messages.

    Thanks for pondering, though.

  4. 4 Eduardo Manchón on Oct 26th, 2005 said:

    Thanks for your post David. It’s nice to hear the reasons directly from the developers of Basecamp.

    Because we were already using “Messages” like stable pieces of text, we expected “Writeboards” to replace them.

    For communicating about the status of the project we just use e-mail. Maybe is worth to keep some of the messages in a weblog style, but I believe most of them are too irrelevant.

    My two cents.

  5. 5 Joaquín Cuenca Abela on Oct 31st, 2005 said:

    Hi David,

    Your post explains clearly the difference in scope of these two features, fair enough.

    There are not a lot of things that go unnoticed on a two person project, so we do not need a place to let anybody know something and thus, as Eduardo said, we were (are) using the messages mainly to store some technical notes, and not as some kind of news frontend of the project.

    I’m sure the messages should be helpful on bigger teams.

    Thank you for taking the time to explain in detail their purpose.

    Cheers,

Leave a Reply


For spam detection purposes, please copy the number 1342 to the field below:

RSS

  • Archives

    • August 2008
    • July 2008
    • June 2008
    • May 2008
    • April 2008
    • March 2008
    • February 2008
    • January 2008
    • December 2007
    • November 2007
    • October 2007
    • September 2007
    • August 2007
    • July 2007
    • June 2007
    • May 2007
    • April 2007
    • March 2007
    • February 2007
    • January 2007
    • December 2006
    • November 2006
    • October 2006
    • September 2006
    • August 2006
    • July 2006
    • June 2006
    • May 2006
    • April 2006
    • March 2006
    • February 2006
    • January 2006
    • December 2005
    • November 2005
    • October 2005
    • September 2005
    • August 2005

  • Categories

    • css (2)
    • html (8)
    • Interaction Design (6)
    • javascript (11)
    • miscellaneous (25)
    • new features / improvements (63)
    • panoramio (49)
    • personal (2)
    • places (25)
    • Uncategorized (5)