This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: What is Backpack? Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

All the signals have been crunching for past few days wrapping up our Next Big Thing. So what is it? We've been struggling with a succinct way to answer that question for a while, but one angle is to define it off something you already know.

Backpack is Basecamp for your life. It's the product I've longed for when I used Instiki as a personal wiki. It's the product I tried to create through a mesh of outlines, email inboxes, post-it notes, The Brain, and a gazillion other systems under the sun. It's a Get Your Shit Together And Keep It So kind of system.

But at the same time it's not limited to or just about productivity, such as The System in a Getting Things Done kind of way. Which is of course what's making it a bit harder to explain. This is really one of those things were words are poor substitutes for experience, which is why the marketing site is all about examples.

All the people we've been demoing Backpack to got it as soon as they started seeing how we used it. So examples, examples, examples. That's what you'll see when the marketing site launches next week.

Until then, you can either hit refresh in your mailbox an unhealthy number of times per hour waiting for one of those golden tickets we'll be distributing, or you can check out the Backpack Manifesto that Jason wrote up.

It's almost here.