37 Signals Highrise Released
Written by on March 20th, 2007 in Ajax News.
37 Signals has released Highrise, a “shared contact manager and task list”. Basecamp is about projects. Highrise is about people.
There is a healthy amount of Ajax used, but not in a flashy way. You will find a lot of inline editing, and sections expanding and contracting allowing you to get a lot of work done in a small area (as apposed to bouncing between pages).
All in all it looks very much like other 37 Signals products, and there are some subtle differences. I noticed that they are getting CSS/JavaScript from different subdomains now.
In the past you would see “/javascript/application.js” whereas now you see “http://asset1.highrisehq.com/stylesheets/print/application.css?1174401102″ so I wonder if the architecture is slightly changed, and what their reason was for making this explicit.
You will see an “Add Person” button all over. Clicking on that has the page getting taken over with a form to add your buddy (and doesn’t take you to the /person/create page). It doesn’t appear that the back button has been hacked here, so if you hit back expecting to go to the page before you clicked on add person, you will go back a page.
The only slightly disappointment was how the free account is really bare bones. You don’t get any of the cool features such as cases, and 25 contacts is pretty meaningless. I also noticed that when you signup the order of accounts had flipped. Subtle. Of course, I do not blame them for trying to sell accounts and make money. All power to them.
They are creating a nice portfolio of products. I am interested to see if they will integrate more (they do a good job with integrating writeboard / basecamp / chats) both within their own product line, and even more so with email (they do a good job at letting you email the system).
Finally, I see a large whole out there. I want a contacts/address book service that lives up in the cloud, that I can use an API to talk too. I don’t want to type in my contacts more than once. On the Mac my apps share the address book, and I want the same on the web.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/37-signals-highrise-released