Here at iXyr, we’ve attempted to make use of Basecamp in our workflows quite a few times. I personally love Basecamp and the way it makes managing projects so easy. Milind on the other hand is more of a one-to-one, I’ll-reply-if-I-feel-like-replying kind of guy. I still get to use Basecamp at work and we make some real good use of the service there. We almost always have multiple projects running and with an abundance of designers and developers working on these projects, the communication never stops.

In order to keep up with everything that’s flowing from one department to the other, every guy I know uses email notifications from Basecamp. Although email notifications seem to the best way to keep an eye on what’s happening on the project, it gets way too overwhelming over time. Sure, you could set up mail rules to organize these emails, but they’d still be clogging up your inboxes. On many occasions, I’d wished for a notifier app, much like Notify, but eventually stopped looking for one. A few days ago, Ben too asked me if such an app was available and I remembered seeing one among the Basecamp Extras page. That was Radar. Unfortunately, it’s not longer in development and hasn’t been updated in a long time.

Enter BaseApp. A collective effort by the super guys at Linebreak and Tim at Made by Elephant, BaseApp is precisely what I explained was missing above. A native Mac app, BaseApp sits cozily in the menubar and notifies you of any activity in your Basecamp account.

Thanks to 37signals having recently upgraded their system to support single logins across all your projects and companies, BaseApp is able to bring you updates from all your active projects in one single list. You may choose to login using your 37Signals ID or OpenID.

BaseApp’s icon in the menubar glows blue when new activity is detected. Of course, support for playable sound and Growl notifications is available, too. Clicking on any activity in the list takes you directly to that activity on your Basecamp site. Cute icons in the list make it easy to distinguish between the kind of activity.

BaseApp is a nifty little utility that’s designed to be minimalist and shows up only when the need arises. A BaseApp license costs €7 and a 14-day trial is available for the skeptical ones. If you’re tired of email notifications, but don’t want to miss out on the important messages flowing through your Basecamp project, why are you still here reading this? Go get it.