We’ve been writing a lot about Basecamp recently, and how this 37signals product changed the way we organize our tasks and projects for MacStories. I personally use Omnifocus to keep my local database in sync with the online service through Spootnik, but there’s a variety of other tools we use, like Radar, Headquarters and now, Freshlog.
Freshlog is a Mac application that enables you to take a screenshot, comment it and upload it to Basecamp. I gave it a 3 days spin, here are my thoughts so far.
Actually, Freshlog support other websites than Basecamp (like GitHub, Assembla and CodeBase) but I’ve got no experience with them so I just sticked with Basecamp, which is perfect to us. Freshlog can either run in the dock or the menubar, but being an app that I don’t use every single second, but many times during the whole day, I opted for the menubar-only running mode. How it works is really simple: everytime you want to take a screenshot of something to upload it your Basecamp account, just click on the menubar icon (or summon the app via keyboard shortcut) and choose if you wanna snap an area, window or fullscreen. Now here’s where the magic happens: Freshlog will open a new translucent window with the preview of the screengrab on the left, title and description fields on the right. You can reveal the screenshot in the Finder (usually goes on the desktop), edit it (perhaps to take quick annotations with Preview? Just edit it, save it and close Preview: done) and share it. If you look closer, you might notice the Collaborate button which, when pressed, reveals a drawer with some options to choose your favorite project management webapp of choice.
Choosing Basecamp brings up some great features that I’m sure will make many users really happy. You can attach the screenshot to an existing project, a milestone and even pick up an assignee. But it doesn’t stop here: what about sending the picture as a comment to a message? Fine, just copy the message ID (you’ll find it in the URL of the message in your Basecamp account), copy it in the text field and here you go, a visual comment.
Other features include the possibility to pause and start freshlog from the menubar item, upload pictures to your freshlog.com account, view previously uploaded screenshots and their links. A free trial version of Freshlog is available, and you can purchase a single user license for just $14.95. Again, this is one of the Basecamp extra apps I can’t work without anymore. If you use Basecamp (or another supported service) I think you should consider trying it.
