The Buckblog

So, as you’ve no doubt heard elsewhere, we announced the launch of Writeboard today. It’s really been a treat to work on this one—a small, tight application with no fluff, created from and running on the latest bleeding-edge version of Rails.

It has been really interesting to watch the blogosphere with the launch of this app. People continually expect 37signals to deliver feature-packed applications for some reason, even though all of our previous applications have been slim, light-weight, and minimal. Admittedly, Writeboard is probably our slimmest, lightest app yet, but it does exactly what we need it to. And that’s why we wrote it.

Naturally, we’ll add to it. Our own needs change, and we do listen to our users. But as with everything else we do, we change when we need to, and not a moment before.

Writeboard is integrated with Backpack, meaning you can create and manage all of your writeboards from there. (Caveat: the free version of Backpack only lets you manage two writeboards at a time.) The implementation of this is David’s brainchild, and should make it relatively simple to do similar integration with Basecamp.

My experience with Writeboard came late, after it was almost completely written. (I’ve been in maintenance mode for Basecamp and Backpack for awhile.) But even so, because of Writeboard’s small size and slim figure, I was able to jump into the code and grok it, whole, in under an hour. Under 30 minutes, even. I was quickly contributing original code to the project.

That’s the kind of power you get when you combine an agile language like Ruby, a powerful framework like Rails, and a small team like 37signals.

Good times!