OmniList is a third-party app that lets you work with your Backpack Pages, Lists, Notes, and Dividers.

The app costs $1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Since launching Basecamp in February of 2004, Basecamp has had a feature called Milestones. Milestones were used to keep track of major dates in a project (phases, launches, deliverables, etc).

Over the years our customers have been asking for a proper calendar to replace the basic list of milestones. They liked the milestones functionality, but they wanted to be able to add and view their milestones in a traditional calendar layout.

Further, they wanted to add items to the calendar that weren't major project milestones. Things like meetings, appointments, lunches, someone's out on vacation, phone calls, etc.

Today we introduce the new Basecamp calendar

We've been listening. Over the past few months we've been hard at work building out this top customer request. Today we're proud to release the brand new Basecamp calendar. The "Milestones" has been replaced with the "Calendar" tab in your projects and on the Dashboard.

When you add something to the calendar you'll see two options: You can make the item an event or you can make it a milestone. A milestone has a checkbox and is marked late if the date passes without the checkbox being checked off. Same as before. Events don't have checkboxes and aren't marked late.

An event might be "9am Team breakfast" while a milestone might be "Client review and signoff" or "Launch". You can use events or milestones any way you'd like, of course.

You can also set up spanned events. Spanned events let you designate events that last more than one day. You can even use spanned events to label project phases.

The 14-day view on the Dashboard and Overview screens have been updated as well.

And here's a real bonus: You can now add events or milestones to any project on the calendar on the Dashboard. When you add an event or milestone from the global Dashboard calendar, you'll see a pulldown that lets you select the appropriate project. Now you don't have to go into a project to add an item to that project's calendar.

It's live in your account right now!

This feature came directly from customer requests and feedback. Thanks for your patience while we developed the new calendar feature. We hope you love it as much as we do. As always, thanks for using Basecamp!

Canister is a third-party Mac app that allows you to easily download your Basecamp files to your computer. It's priced at $9.99.

Whether you are looking to keep an archived backup or need a way to easily interact with your files, Canister can help. Utilize the power of Mac and Finder to easily interact with all your Basecamp files. With multiple-account support, you will be able to download all of your files, no matter how many accounts you work with.

In "Being Bullish on Android Doesn't Mean Being Bearish on Apple," Tim Beyers looks at what works and what doesn't on the new Samsung Galaxy.

Meebo, my cloud-based IM client, suffers some hiccups, but Evernote works great. So does Highrise, a cloud-based contact-management system from 37signals that I've come to love.

Read the full piece at Motley Fool.

Aging Wisely was founded in 1998 by Florida Elder Law Attorney Linda Chamberlain. She saw the varied needs of elders and their families and formed Aging Wisely so families would have help navigating care options. In 2005, she formed EasyLiving, Inc., a private duty home health care company serving individuals and families in Pinellas County, Florida with home care, companionship and senior transportation. Below, she explains how her companies use Backpack.

Our companies serve seniors in their homes and therefore have a very mobile work force. The families of our customers are all over the country and world. Employees are rarely in an office setting and communication and coordination are vital. 37signals tools have helped improve communication and efficiency. Because the products are so intuitive, employees didn’t experience the frustrations and learning curve that they did with other solutions we had tried.

Both companies use Backpack extensively, which has replaced accessing a server for documents or long strings of emails that become cumbersome. Our team can access the documents they need, share notes and information from virtually anywhere with web access. Aging Wisely’s care managers use iphones, so they can pull up information just about anywhere.

EasyLiving benefits from the shared calendar for managing time off, on-call schedules and trainings. With 24/7 services, client emergencies and communicating office happenings to a large number of fields staff, this is vital.

A couple of specific examples of how we use 37signals tools:

Our care management team at Aging Wisely is comprised of experts in the field of eldercare, with diverse specializations. We serve as resources for our clients and need to be up to date on everything from new healthcare requirements to latest Alzheimer’s research and what products can help our clients age in place. To do this well, we need to be able to share articles, training information, links, etc. We have different pages on Backpack for different topics, making it easy not only to share the information but to access it any time.

Our team is known for its expertise in the community and gets asked to do presentations for a variety of groups. We often do these speaking engagements together or work on the presentations and materials together. Our Director of Communications works remotely, but can collaborate from anywhere with ease using these tools. When we plan a presentation, team members will post ideas and work on input to the Power Point and/or handouts using Backpack.

My tip for other customers: For teams who aren’t used to using collaborative tools it can be a challenge to switch the mindset and get less email-dependent. Over time, though, people will see the benefits and develop new habits. Do a little demo for everyone and explain how the tools will make life easier. One of the great things about these tools is that they are pretty intuitive, so you don’t need any major training and the learning curve is minimal, but it helps to explain what the purpose and benefits are.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.

A customer asks: "Can I add a Basecamp login box to my own website?" Answer: Yes. Plug this code into your HTML (note the customizing required).

A list of tips to help you be more productive in Highrise.

In your contacts tab, you’ll see an option to change the view of your contacts list at the top of the screen. You can filter your contacts by name, title, email, city, state, country, zip, phone, or background. Or you can create custom fields now too. More details.

Cyber-Duck is a digital agency based in London that specializes in user-experience, SaaS projects, and online marketing. Tom Hicks, Cyber-Duck's Online Marketing Manager, explains how the company uses Highrise below.

A CRM became a business requirement for Cyber-Duck in 2009 after Excel contact databases became messy and over-complicated. New members of the team found them difficult to decipher after years of new columns and redundant colour coding, and with the volume of enquiries we were receiving and proposals we were sending out it became difficult to keep track of new business.

During 2009 we were happily using Basecamp and knew that 37signals had another product which may suit our circumstances, but we wanted to consider all the options available to us. We set about trialling several other CRM systems for small businesses like ours, and found some great options out there, but they all had one thing in common – they were over-complicated.

What we needed was something that would give us the required functionality without all the unnecessary extras. There were 2 reasons behind this; firstly, training becomes much easier if a system is simple and indicative; secondly we wanted to ensure we were getting value for money. If a product has features which remain redundant, then you are paying for something you don’t need.

From our research, Highrise appeared to be the only solution to tick all of our boxes. It is intuitive and can be picked up with little or no training. We like the fact that we can manage and tag all contacts including staff, suppliers, associates' clients, and potential clients. The ability to browse by multiple tags (our tags shown at right) is especially impressive.

The latest ‘activity stream’ allows management to have a quick (and collaborative) overview of the current status of new deals without delving too far into the system. This is important to us because historically, internal communication about new business was difficult due to the large amount of information available and the lack of data centralisation. The ‘deals’ feature also allows a quick overview of projects which have recently been won or lost. This is great for building up a picture of cash flow for the coming months.

We’ve also found that the ‘follow up’ feature has been very useful for the sales team, as it gives them a gentle reminder of when will be a good time to follow up leads. Highrise simply works well for us; it has enough features to do what we need it to do, but 37signals don’t feel the need to continuously add more things we would be unlikely to use. It’s also quite cost efficient as pricing scales as the business does.

My tips for other Highrise customers:

Tip #1 – Exploit tags - Tags may be something you see all over the web, but don’t underestimate their power in the context of a CRM. Make sure you get all users to conform to the same tagging system, this means that when you need to find an expert in SEO or a list of your previous clients, you’ll be able to get them in the click of a button.

Tip #2 – Keep deals up to date – The whole point of a CRM is that it’s a centralised repository of information; so it’s important that you keep all your deals as up to date as you can. This means that when someone goes in to find out something about a deal, they will be presented with all they could ever ask for; thus saving time and streamlining both your day and theirs.

Tip #3 – Don’t forget the follow ups – Highrise gives you the chance to create simple follow up alerts (Tasks) for any employee. This is particularly great for sales as it allows you to set times to follow up your leads and be reminded exactly when you need to do this. Just like that, forgetting to follow up is no longer a problem!