We are pleased to announce the launch of Mission Measurement’s new Web site.
You can check it out here: http://www.missionmeasurement.com and read more about the project in our portfolio.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
For the uninitiated: Basecamp is a project management and collaboration platform designed around a pretty simple philosophy (see Basecamp’s “Manifesto”). You could probably distill that philosophy into one word: simple. Basecamp is all about usability and taking simple constructs like the staple “to-do” list to the next level.
Basecamp is simple, if I haven’t made that abundantly clear yet. On top of that it’s painful easy to use. I found at one point, that I couldn’t stop playing with it. I was like a kid in a candy store. I just couldn’t stop exploring and fiddling with it like some weird obsessive mad scientist. If this all sounds a bit unproductive, well…you just have to see it for yourself and if you’re one of our clients you surely will.
There are so many things we agree with regarding Basecamp’s manifesto that we toyed with stealing it, we’d never do that of course, so instead we decided to just nod in agreement and use the thing like crazy.
Where’s the issue tracker? To-do lists aren’t really a proper replacement for a good issuer tracker. While browsing the Basecamp forums I came across a couple of feature requests for a bug or issue tracker. Basecamp’s answer was essentially: we don’t think issue tracking is a generic or broad enough need for Basecamp because it’s associated with a certain type of industry, namely: software development. In my opinion this is a rather myopic view, I can’t think of a project, in any field, that would not benefit from having some kind of ability to track general issues or problems.
Releasing an API (and it sounds like this will happen, when is another story) will help alleviate some of these issues by giving 3rd party developers the ability to integrate different tools for different business needs. There’s no firm date on when the API will be released but I feel like it can’t happen soon enough.
All in all what’s missing isn’t really that bad and the Basecamp curators seem to be extremely responsive to the community. If a request just makes sense they seem more than accommodating. They’ve added things like time-tracking and an interesting collaborative device known as a “Writeboard.” There should be no fear that the project will not continue to evolve and tighten-up over time.
It might seem that this article has concentrated a great deal on “bad things” but really, there are so many good things about Basecamp it’s hard to know where to start and where to stop. The best way to understand it is to try it and the best part about trying it is, it’s totally free: visit Basecamphq.com and sign-up for the free account to try it for yourself.
Love it or hate it, 37Signals deserves respect for trying something different in the project management space. There are plenty of features that could be added, willy-nilly, but by resisting the temptation they’ve managed to keep it…well…manageable. As a testament to its user friendly nature, I’ve never had to reference the user manual for anything and I like that; hopefully you will too.
Recently, while programming a little RSS feed Flashlet, I came across a bug in Flash involving the MovieClip.createTextField() method. A bug that felt strangely familiar.
I originally ran into this bug while programming the McDougal-Littell “Take-Home Tutor” a couple of years back (in my previous life) and had pretty much forgotten all about it…until now (glad to know the old noodle’s still working).
I’m loading the RSS feed from a blog and dynamically creating textfields using the MovieClip.createTextField(…) method to house the content from the feed within container movieclips. When I would try to lay these clips out they would end up overlapping a few ten or twenty pixels or so. On a whim I tried calling “._height” on the container clip I was using for layout just before placing the next clip and low and behold that seemed to do the trick.
The code looks something like this:
I’m assuming the call to prevClip._height forces the movieclip to recalculate its height before continuing on with the layout.
Hooray for trying random stuff!
I don’t know how new this is, I hadn’t heard about it until today.
The original SAMOROST was simply breathtaking, gorgeous, splendrific, amazing, and wonderfully entertaining. From the mesmerizing ambient sound effects to the enchantingly intricate, lush, and rustic world SAMOROST did not fail at delighting the senses. Just about the only thing wrong with it was that it all seemed to end too soon.
Well, they’ve done it again.
Meet SAMOROST2. The basic point-and-click play mechanics remain but the designers have uped the ante by adding a more ambient soundtrack and even more detail to the surrounding world. Give it a second, it takes a little while to load. Then…point and click your way through the wonderment. I never thought I could love again.
Talk about raising the bar.
