We are very excited to introduce, and give you a little preview of the first application from Wikid Labs. It’s called Reveille, and it is going to add some great new features to 37signals’ Backpack application that aren’t available today.

Before we tell you more about the features, we want to explain a little of the history behind the idea for Reveille.  We have been happy users of 37signal’s Basecamp and Backpack for about two years. In fact, we’ve used Basecamp to manage the development of Reveille.  The idea for Reveille came as Greg’s wife was trying to move the family calendar completely into Backpack from iCal on her Mac, but was finding the management of reminders to be a bit of a challenge.  She wanted an easier way to add the reminders she was used to having, for instance, reminders for friends birthdays, or other important appointments. The solution hit Greg one day, late October, in the place where all good ideas seem to come, the shower.

What we’ve ended up developing is a system for being able to automatically create reminders for Backpack calendar events by using special hashtags in the event names.  For example, you might want to create an event for an important meeting and be reminded of it two hours prior. Today, you have two choices in Backpack for doing this.  You could use the built-in event reminders set for 30 minutes before the event, which may not remind you when you want. Or, you could manually add a reminder for the event, which is way too much work in our opinion.  The new option, using Reveille, is to create your event and somewhere in the event name you would include ‘#rem2hrs’. When Reveille scans your calendar it will pick up the hashtag and add a reminder two hours before the event for you.  And, even better, it means there’s no limit to the number of reminders per event. You can add as many reminder hashtags as you care to.  We found this to be a great shortcut for managing calendar reminders, and we hope you will too.

Just to summarize, Reveille’s main features are:

1. Automatic reminder creation for calendar events from within Backpack or any other Backpack app that allows the creation of calendar events.
2. Easily create multiple reminders for a calendar event just by using more hashtags
3. See and manage your reminders, shown in relationship to your calender events, from a simple interface within Reveille.

Reveille isn’t publicly available just yet, so check out our website to signup for our email newsletter, and follow us on Twitter so that we can keep you up to date on the release of Reveille, and exclusive discount offers.  We hope you’re as excited as we are about using Reveille to streamline your calendar experience in Backpack.  We totally welcome your feedback, so please let us know what you think.

First, how did we find ourselves in this situation? Well, it certainly wasn’t hard. Our idea for Haven (a web-based collaborative development environment you’ll be hearing more about very soon) started small, and over time we designed more and more features that we thought we would solve some of the problems we have with traditional IDEs. It was a natural process, and we are building this application for ourselves so it was really fun to dream. We were excited and got started with development. Little did we know we were creating a huge problem for ourselves by jumping in so quickly. We very quickly got overwhelmed by all that needed to be done.

The kick in the pants we needed was to go back and heed some advice from 37signals’ book, Getting Real. In it, the authors had the answer to our problem:

We’ve read Getting Real and have followed 37signals’ Blog, Signal vs. Noise, for quite some time. If you aren’t following them already I highly recommend you grab their RSS feed. We are familiar with the ideas they used to build their successful business. The idea of doing less was not really that new to us. But, we still resisted the process because we were unwilling to put aside more advanced features that we thought would make us really love using Haven. Still, during a recent planning conversation, at last we really “got real”. We agreed to focus on a short list of three key features. And it’s the best decision we’ve made to date.

We realized that “doing less” means the features we thought were important needed to be put aside (perhaps for a few months, perhaps forever) until we had our key features nailed. It’s a scary proposition to turn your back on what you feel are your unique, customer attracting features. But, the wisdom in doing this is you are going to have the experience and feedback of using the application to draw from as you begin to slowly add additional features.

So, my advice is to sit down early and really focus on what the core functionality is for your application. Then once you’ve done than, it might help even more to do it again for good measure. It will save you time immediately and going forward because you will be adding features out of experience instead of pulling them out of thin air.

I hope you found this information helpful in some way. I’d love to hear your thoughts.