Basecamp and Campfire served their purposes well. As a team working on iPlan we predominantly stuck to using Basecamp; Campfire was only used when we were collaborating on pieces at the same time. I found features I enjoyed, and features that were rather annoying. As a group we often texted each other for deadlines, but most of our actual communication about the project work was posted in basecamp. Basecamp made it easy to share and upload new versions in a quick and convenient factor, and when splitting up tasks, that helped a lot.

We frequently used the ability to upload and download files, particularly larger files. It was nice to work from basecamp as the servers were relatively fast. However, once we uploaded these files, we often made minute changes or sometimes wished we could just change the name. The ability to not change names and limited time to edit posts was somewhat frustrating. One time, we had the wrong file zipped with another file and we couldn’t change its name and found out after 15 minutes, so couldn’t edit the post. This led to confusion and just caused us to spend more time than should have been necessary. We also seemed to find that campfire should just be built into the messages within the general basecamp group area. We typically used messages so we could alert eachother with emails when major stuff got done. If we had the ability to chat within the message, it would’ve been a bit more useful.

In my opinion, our greatest success was getting iPlan to work with Facebook. None of us had any experience working with Facebook, and with its many bugs combined with assembling it into mobile jquery, it was a miracle we were able to get it working in time. Our biggest failure was choosing jquery mobile; it seemed to fight many of the calls or require a separate work around just for jquery’s sake. After getting the facebook calls to work, we had to spend an additional 8 hours recoding for it to work with jquery.

If we were to do it again, we definitely would drop mobile jquery. It simply hasn’t had enough time to fully develop. Besides CSS3 is starting to sprout, it would be a bit of fun to use CSS3 transitions and such. Other than that I was pretty happy with our outcome. On a fast server iPlan would definitely get some users.