CouldBe Studios (that’s us, in case you’re confused) is many things to many people, but sedentary it ain’t. We shuttle between a home office, an office-office, and several points in between. How do we do it? Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the apps, programs and sites that make it possible to run a business from anyplace we happen to be.

• Basecamp: Having a place where we can communicate with our clients and keep track of notes, tasks and milestones is definitely a good thing. For them and for us.
• Highrise: It’s new, but already we’re digging the ability to collaboratively add notes to contacts. Need to know who talked to the ISP last and what they said? It’s all there. Our inner OCD rejoices.
• Backpack: We still use this to keep more “lightweight” lists, and we’ve even been known to use the Writeboard feature to write drafts of blog posts. Yes, we know we can use Writeboards in Basecamp. We’re just used to them in Backpack. (Did we mention our inner OCD?)

(Note to 37signals: you know what would be really cool? If all these accounts could hold hands and be friends. You know, one login to rule them all? Plz and thx.)

• iChat: While we remain highly suspicious of the A in AIM, we grudgingly admit that we feel a certain amount of affection for iChat, especially for video conferencing. Originally we thought we’d use Skype for video chats, but since our love affair with Skype went sour we thought we’d give iChat AV a try. We haven’t been sorry.
• Ma.gnolia: We bookmark obsessively, but the thing that sold us on Ma.gnolia was the ease with which we can send bookmarks back and forth without having them come up in our bookmark stream. If one of us runs across a site we want to share, we can just click the little “Send Bookmark Recommendation” icon, choose a recipient (or several) from our list, and viola. Especially handy for links we don’t need to act on right away but hope to peruse at our leisure. As a company we’re always working on a million things, so it’s nice to be able to prioritize without missing out on anything.
• Box.net: Essential for file sharing, which is a thing we do a lot of. We miss the friendly little drag and drop-able interface of the previous incarnation, but still think it’s pretty spiff. The new color scheme is definitely easier on the eyes, and since one of us is desperately myopic we appreciate things like that.
• Honorable Mention: Google Reader. We were using NetNewsWire Lite for our extensive and well-documented RSS habit, but once we moved to Google Reader we never looked back. We love the fact that we can view our feeds from anywhere – including our phone. Google, we kind of love you.

And last, but certainly not least…


• BlackBerry Pearl smartphone: Our mobile line is our business line, and we figured that since we’re going to be connected all the time we might as well be really
  connected. Being able to read and respond to e-mail on the bus? So freaking cool. Also, look how much more productive we can be during our commute!

Anything you’ve found especially useful that we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags:
couldbe studios, productivity, mobile office, basecamp, backpack, highrise, ichat, ma.gnolia, box.net, blackberry pearl

Everyone knows the best way to stay organized during the holiday season is to make lists. Lots and lots of lists. (OCD? What OCD?) We’ve got lists for home, lists for work…sometimes we’ve even got lists that keep track of our lists. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why, what have you heard?

One of the most satisfying thing about lists, of course, is being able to cross off finished items, and the ultimate evolution of crossing things off is the ticky box. We admit it: we love to tick.

With that in mind, we thought we’d test out some different applications and methods for keeping track of things online – both for the company and for our personal lives (which, lets face it, could use some organization). The three we tested were: a wiki, hosted on our own server; Goplan; and Backpack.

We signed up for a bunch of hosted wikis before installing our own. Some had features we liked, but all had features we didn’t, and eventually we decided it would be a good learning experience to set one up from scratch. We went with MediaWiki, the same back-end that runs Wikipedia. The installation was much easier than we expected; just a little databasing and some configuring and viola.

The learning curve for actually using the wiki was a lot steeper; it uses a sort of proprietary code which limits its functionality, and although we’ve overridden it in places, it’s still kind of a pain to update on the fly. Also: no ticky boxes. We need our ticky boxes! We tried working without them, but it’s just not the same. The lists we put up got updated once and have sat, stagnant, for the past few months.

On the other hand, we found that for things like Christmas lists, (static) link collections and biographies, the wiki is ideal. We’ve added pages for each of us and included picture links for our families, who know our shipping address but are looking for a little inspiration, and have embedded copies of our Google calendar so that anyone who visits can see what we’re up to. We’re in the process of creating link lists to compile all of our various online identities in one place. The wiki is taking off, just in a different direction from what we first envisioned. How much fun is that?

Verdict: great for what it’s great for, but not a to-do list.

We got invited to the Goplan private beta a few months ago. Goplan is a project management service (a la Basecamp) from the folks at Webreakstuff. Although it touts itself as a perfect place to manage everything from party planning to home finances, our first impression was that it would be much more useful for keeping track of business projects than personal projects. We started tracking the behind-the-scenes stuff we needed to do in order to get the business going.

Unlike other project tracking applications, Goplan is relatively bloat-free, which is perfect for a small business like us. We love the smooth interface and the ease of updating; new projects are a snap to create. Also, they’ve just released a developer API, and we’re excited to see what this could offer in the future.

There are some bugs, however, which don’t delight us. These include weird text formatting (it claims to support Textile but doesn’t actually) and an RSS feed which isn’t customizable. The RSS issue is a big one: the feed reports every little change, which makes it functionally useless; after skipping past another “task opened” and “task closed” it’s too easy to miss an actual milestone (as we’ve done several times). These are easy to forgive in a beta. Less easy to forgive? Temperamental ticky boxes. Yes, you heard right. Sometimes the subcategory ticky boxes do not properly tick. Our hearts are still healing from the trauma.

Verdict: Promising, but more business-oriented than personal.

Which brings us to Backpack. (Full disclosure: if you sign up with Backpack using the links in this article, we will get a small amount of account credit. They’re not giving us kickbacks; it’s just an affiliate program. But we will smile like monkeys and possibly do a little dance if credit appears on our account, and isn’t that worth it?) We decided to try it out, since the bottom-tier account is free. Within five days we had upgraded to a paid account so that we could add more pages. And we needed them, since we quickly decided to use Backpack for, you know, everything. We’ve got lists of things we need for the office, lists of ideas for future posts (we actually wrote this post on Backpack’s writeboard), and lists of client-related tasks. But it’s not all business: we used Backpack to keep track of the myriad accessories needed to travel with a toddler when we took our recent vacation.

Backpack’s interface is deceptively simple; the real power is in the application’s flexibility and lack of unnecessary bells and whistles. We can create one list for each page or many; lists and items can be reordered and edited painlessly, and the ticky boxes – oh, the ticky boxes.

In addition to all that, there are writeboards, image collections, notes areas and file uploads, and pages can be shared with individual people or made public with the click of a button.

Everything works exactly as it should. It’s easy to overlook just how much the application is actually doing because it does it so elegantly.

Verdict: We heart Backpack.

Technorati Tags: backpack, basecamp, goplan, mediawiki, wiki, lists, ticky boxes