At last, the calendar for Backpack from 37signals is ready to go live! Thanks to Rex Hammock (and Dave Winer), we know that the roll-out has begun. The feature has not appeared within my account as of yet, but the site has been unavailable more than once this evening, so it looks like the release is in progress.
Check out this great overview page for all the details and some terrific demos. According to the site, the calendar will not be part of the free Backpack account, which seems appropriate. I would expect that they will see a high number of account upgrades over the next few months. 37signals does an excellent job of providing free accounts and good incentives for paying ones.
Of course, an online calendar is not exactly a new thing, or even a killer app in and of itself. In fact, Google's Calendar is very similar and I've been using it happily for the last two months. The key to this calendar is the simplicity, the lovely look, and most importantly, the fact that it is part of Backpack itself - one site for every note, reminder, list, file, and calendar - all shared anyway you like. Very sweet.
Now, I just need to actually use it to see if any of this is true :)
The biggest problem I see with all these cool web calendars is that none of them have support for bi-directional synchronization with handheld devices. (Except maybe Yahoo IF you use Windows).
I myself don't use a handheld device, but I support a number of people who do. I would love to set everyone up with Backpack or Google calendar and call it a solution, but they all want synchronization.
Who will get it first?
Posted by: Brian Glass | July 27, 2006 at 09:43 AM