Basecamp pisses me off occasionally
We’ve been using 37 Signals’ Basecamp to write documents for the last couple of weeks at the Telegraph. All in all it’s a great product, but there are a few things that are really annoying.
For example, when someone writes a comment on a Writeboard that you created or contributed to you don’t get a notification by email, and there’s no way to subscribe to one either.
In fact, Writeboards are very much a second-class citizen in Basecamp. They’re hosted on another site, and because of the way the authentication works between them, the back button quite often ends up just redirecting you back to the same Writeboard again. The Writeboard itself has a URL, but that’s not the URL you should use to share it.
Writeboards are incredibly useful, don’t get me wrong, but they should definitely be better integrated. It would also be very useful if you could export them to PDF or Word format.
I’d probably not mention this, except that 37 Signals are really quite cocky about how usable their software is and how carefully they think things like this through. I wish they’d spend less time showing off, and more sorting issues like these out.
