Backpack Journal Dashboard Widget
Recently, 37 Signals added a journal feature to Backpack. I wrote a little dashboard widget that uses their API and can post your status and create new journal entries.
To use this, you’ll need your Backpack API Key. To get that, go to ‘my info’ and click the ‘Show your API key’
After that, enter your text in whichever field you want and hit enter. Only the field you changed will be submitted.
Why didn’t I just use a Web Clip (the safari feature where you can take a section of a page and make it a widget)? I tried this first and was unhappy with the results.
I’m not sure I’ll do much more work on this. I think I like that it’s write only. However, one could see updating it to read everyone’s status and growl notify when someone changes their status or writes a journal entry. But for now, I’m not planning on doing that.
Please let me know about any bugs you run into. Also, feel free to fork it and do with it what you will. The Dashcode project is in github as Backpack Journal.
Enjoy
feed
Concentrate
rooSwitch
Goal Tender
Count It Off
May 27th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I’m not getting the updates on the backpack site for data entered into the journal… It took the API key, found the various names in backpack, I selected mine, but I get no feedback on updates other than Yellow Fade Technique.
A green tick mark discretely in the bottom right of each of the status and entry sections would indicate that they had been updated. Does this app pull current status/entry information when dashboard is pulled up?
Thanks -RS
May 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I see, it’s due to the http/https distinction.
This widget needs that feedback, so we know if the update succeeded or not. Also, it appears not to poll the current status, if we update on the site and then come back to the widget. The relevance of this is that accidental stale updates might be sent, by the errant keystroke.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Rahul, thanks for the input. All good recommendations. I can’t make any promises of when I’ll get to any of it, but it’s appreciated.
May 28th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Thanks for the job, it’s simply usefull
Growl Notification would be a great feature!
May 28th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
When I install this and attempt to enter my url subdomain and API key, the widget consistently crashes. I’m on Tiger. Is this a Leopard only widget? Anything else you would like me to try?
May 28th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Hi Phil, thanks for letting me know. I haven’t tried it in Tiger but will. Not sure what would be Leopard only about it but who knows
May 28th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Pressing enter twice can lead to “double posting”; it’s not unreasonable to assume people will seldom want to re-enter the same text twice.
Perhaps the widget should, on launch/update, display current status and entry above the respective text fields. Upon entering a new status or update, the text should be removed from the text field, a tickmark or somesuch should indicate API response of update completion. Then, the widget should check current entry/status information, presumptively being the updated information (but perhaps not) and present that above the text fields, as before.
This feedback notwithstanding, thanks for working on this! Your work makes this feature usable, to any real degree…
-RS
May 29th, 2008 at 2:57 am
Can’t seem to work on Tiger for me eather… Nothing happens on the Backpack side. Is this because I’m using a Solo account?
jb
May 29th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Indeed it does not work on Tiger. I’ll add this to the TODO list, but again, no idea when I (or someone else?
) will get to it.
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:24 am
This widget looks awesome, great job! If only the Journal was in Basecamp instead of/in addition to Backpack
May 5th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I really like the widget, but it’s enormous next to all my other widgets. I only have a MacBook and rely on many other widgets. Could make a “mini” version an option please? I don’t know if it’s still being developed.