A beauty landed in our queue today. Select Start Studios, usually in the background providing services for other developers, have released a fresh new Basecamp app. Now the App Store has seen plenty of good basecamp apps, some of which are even quite pretty. But Headquarters, is in a league of its own.
Headquarters features a dark look, with bold typography, beautifully hijacked tab bar, and floating spinners. There’s almost nothing native about this app, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, although some people hate this kind of thing. One more thing about the user interface, and that’s there’s no ‘wow’ moments within the app. What you see in the screenshots is what you get—it’s no Pastebot that’s for sure.
About functionality, Headquarters is well integrated with Basecamp. The Dashboard shows you an at-a-glance view of all your projects (even from multiple accounts), tapping into Projects takes you to your task lists and milestones. Leave comments, complete tasks, send and receive messages, and see a list of updates to the project. My initial impressions are that it’s quite like the other apps out there, with a better interface. One thing that’s totally lacking, and it’s a shame considering the UI, is that there’s no offline access. Every time you tap to complete a task, you have to wait for it to sync with the server—really painful. Without internet access there’s no using the app, at all. So far the only app I know that does this is Outpost by David Kaneda.
But please don’t take this as my final word on the app; I’m only here to introduce it. Besides we’ve stopped using basecamp for our backend communication, and I haven’t used the app long enough to see how it fits into my workflow (would you want SA to do a review?). Headquarters costs a discounted $7.99 at the App Store, and it might just be the perfect way to satisfy your pixel addiction. But there’s no real reason to switch from your current solution.