Incremental and consistent improvements can lead to great victories. That’s what I wrote on my personal blog moments ago. Here is a list of recent improvements we made to PlannerX.

Bookmarklet works in IE8

We announced PlannerX bookmarklet last week. The bookmarklet lets you open PlannerX right in your Basecamp page. This makes updating your plans super quick and easy. We had a small issue that prevented it from working in IE8 (thanks Stephanie for reporting it!). We fixed that and even added a visual guide about setting up the bookmarklet with IE8. Enjoy!

PlannerX Bookmarklet in IE8

Login problems solved

Few customers mentioned they could not login to PlannerX despite making sure everything was setup correctly – username, password, URL, API access – everything. This was a puzzling problem, but we could solve it in minutes once we got access to the problematic account. It was actually our mistake. We forgot to handle dashes in Basecamp sub domains in a recent upgrade. It’s now fixed and working fine.

Easier login form

While we were on the login functionality, we also made a small usability improvement to the login form. You now don’t have to enter your full Basecamp URL. Just enter the initial company name / sub-domain part. .basecampq.com is added already. This will even make it easier for people to understand what they need to enter in that field! Here’s how the revised login form looks.

More usable login screen for PlannerX

Bug with new task saving solved

I am glad not many customers noticed this 😉 We had a jarring bug that wouldn’t save a new task if both the milestone and todo list were also freshly created. It was another quick fix, but a significant one!

How do all these small improvements measure up?

Here’s what Ben Thomas, a PlannerX customer had to say:

WAHOO!

Fantastic response.
Thank you ever so much. Wonderful.
That is brilliant. Thank you.

Ben

Makes my day!

Good news! You no longer need to remember PlannerX website address and login to a separate page to use PlannerX. We created a bookmarklet so you can open PlannerX right within your Basecamp page. It’s as easy as clicking a button in your browser toolbar and saves you a lot of back and forth. It’s also safe and secure.

Here’s how it looks

PlannerX Bookmarklet in action

Activate the bookmarklet from here

What are the advantages?

A lot of users found it inconvenient to open a new browser page and login to PlannerX. We felt that if we could integrate PlannerX within Basecamp, things will be a lot easier. While we were figuring out the best way to do this, Countdown guys released a bookmarklet that opens Countdown within Basecamp. We loved the idea and implemented it for PlannerX. We also revised our login process so that it works well with this system.

With the bookmarklet,

• You can now open PlannerX within Basecamp
• You don’t have to open another browser page for PlannerX
• PlannerX auto detects which project you are working on and loads that up
• If you select “Remember Me” on our login forms, you can go straight to PlannerX next time onward.

This is a significant improvement in usability for PlannerX.

Activate the bookmarklet from here

What is a bookmarklet?

A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript that lets you quickly perform an action. They are typically stored in browser’s favorites / bookmark / links bar. Just like you open your favorite website by clicking on it in your Favorites bar, you load PlannerX within Basecamp by clicking its name in your Favorites bar. You can read more about bookmarklets in this Wikipedia article.

Credits

Our bookmarklet was inspired from the Countdown bookmarklet. And was coded by Malay Ladu.

Activate the bookmarklet from here