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37Signals: Patchy workarounds are not “solutions”

November 1st, 2007 Posted in Business Strategy

I love me some Basecamp, I really do. I also am absolutely addicted to Highrise. The team at 37Signals does great work.

But for the life of me I can’t figure out why they’ve had such a poor implementation of the overall login system. Why does every tool need a separate login? Am I the only one that thinks this is sloppy?

A while back they created OpenBar, an OpenID-based global header bar that appears on all of your 37Signals tools. Thing is, once you add a project into the OpenBar you can’t remove it. I accidentally clicked on a link in my OpenBar to one of my old company’s BaseCamp projects (it’s early and I’m using a trackpad) and bam! I’m into the project. Since I’ve not yet had my access removed from the project, I wanted to remove that project so I don’t do another accidental click and see info I shouldn’t be seeing.

Unfortunately, the hacky OpenBar workaround to the problem of a lack of global login doesn’t allow you to delete items from the bar. The only way to remove items is to have the project owner (in this case my old company) remove your access on their end.

Nice.


This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 8:31 am and is filed under Business Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • Pete
    This site says it all - http://www.whybasecampsux.org/. There are a bunch of great alternatives out there. 37$ are digging themselves into a hole. Its time to bail.
  • Ned Griffin
    I totally agree with you. Basecamp guys have created software that is popular, but now they don't want to listen to their customer's requests. I personally asked them to change this a couple of times. They ignored me, so I decided why stick to Basecamp, if people say that there's much better software out there. So I switched to Wrike http://www.wrike.com. The tool definitely has more to offer than Basecamp.
  • @DHH I'd found that tip, but the problem is that in order to do that you a) have to still have access to the basecamp project you're trying to remove, and/or b) have to actually log into the site.

    The problem in this case is that I still have access to something I should have access to. I'm trying to remove the connection so that I'm not viewing anything I'm not supposed to without actually having to log into the thing that is off-limits.
  • DHH
    If you don't want to have a certain user account appear in your OpenBar, you can just switch from OpenID to a regular username and password on that user account. That'll take it out of the bar.
  • We have been avid users of BaseCamp in the past and while it doesn't work for us now, we loved it at the time. We do love Campfire however, and use it daily.

    Having said that, you bring up a very good point - handling user accounts across a growing list of applications developed by a single company. The lesson here appears to be that if you start out with one application and grow to a suite of applications, you must support a single user account across the entire suite, and make it easy to jump from application to application. I doubt that anyone held back from signing up for all of the 37Signals products, however it is a good lesson for other companies growing their online application portfolio.
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