We use Basecamp here at Smoking Apples. It helps us keep track of our to-dos, messages to each other, and goals; as a group. And as anyone who’s used Basecamp would tell you, it’s a powerful and effective tool. (That’s what she said.) Problem is, it’s not exactly a great experience navigating the site on an iPhone. That’s where Morfunk’s Outpost comes in. It takes most of Basecamp’s features and packages them up, all nice and neat for you to use on the go. It’s an extremely well put-togethered piece of software. It’s beautifully designed, easy to navigate, and lets you use Basecamp’s power almost completely. If you use Basecamp enough that accessing it at home only isn’t enough, Outpost is for you.

Setting Up Camp

You start off by entering your Basecamp address and account info, and once it’s done its initial sync, you’re all set to go. [Phil: Currently, Outpost only supports one account, but developer David Kaneda says multiple accounts will be added in a later version.] Outpost will auto-sync upon startup each time.

Once in, you have quick access to a dashboard of recent changes, a projects page, milestones, your to-dos, and sync. Inside the projects area, you’ll find messages, to-dos, and you can creat and edit just as you would in a desktop browser. You can follow conversations with project collaborators, assign to-dos to your minions, and mark items as complete. Should you create any unnecessary items, a swipe and press will delete them. And that about covers Outpost’s features. It doesn’t sound feature packed, but it will take the massive Basecamp, and fit it all onto your iPhone.

I Want S’mores

I am very pleased with Basecamp. It’s been stable, with no crashes or hangs. The only two oddities I’ve come across are the way the dashboard disappears when going into project view, and the inability to delete your own comments in the messages section. With the projects view, the dashboard’s buttons at the bottom disappears, and you can’t jump to sync or to your to-dos without tapping “return to dashboard” first. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, and doesn’t really detract from the usability of Outpost. It adds one extra touch to move to your own to-dos, but two’s not so bad.

It would also be great to not only keep track of your own to-dos you haven’t done yet, but also easily look up past to-dos you’ve already completed. As it stands, you have to to back to project-wide to-dos and poke around till you find what you’re looking for. Might be a problem on Basecamp’s end, and something that Outpost can’t work around easily. The last thing that bugged me was simply not being able to delete comments I made about to-dos. You can do this on the site, but isn’t possible in Outpost. I don’t see the reason why this wasn’t included. If you happened to create a comment that you wanted to delete, you can’t. You can edit previously written messages, just not comments to said posted message.

Camping Essentials

Aside from those two niggling complaints, I am glad to have Outpost on my phone, and avid users of Basecamp would find it a great value even at its $13 price point. [Phil: In the time that I've used Outpost, I've come to like it. It is very simple to use, and feature wise, it's almost all there. I'd even go as far as calling it the iPhone version of Basecamp.] You can find Outpost on the App Store.

Parts of this review contributed by Phil Olin.