BaseApp is a lightweight utility that sits in your menu bar and monitors the activity from your Basecamp account or accounts. You're alerted of updates or changes to your Basecamp, and accessing the new changes are just a click away.
Created by Made by Elephant (of Maxvoltar fame) and Linebreak (the people that gave us CloudApp), BaseApp was designed to combat the problem of too-frequent Basebamp notification e-mails.
As a collaboration and project management tool, Basecamp can be configured to send users an e-mail any time a message is sent, a project is updated, a file is uploaded or changes are made to a to-do list or project. This is a really terrific feature, but if you are working with lots of other people, especially when a project is undergoing frequent changes, those e-mails can quickly overtake your inbox.
Creating a filter for Basecamp e-mails defeats the purpose of being alerted of changes and new messages, thus BaseApp was born. Instead of receiving e-mail notifications, you get notified on your Mac OS X desktop.
The app runs in the background, checking for changes on your various Basecamp accounts at intervals of every minute, every five minutes, every fifteen minutes or every half hour.
If a new change is made, the menu bar will change color and you can choose to have a Growl notification and/or an audible alert show you what has been changed.
If you don't want to be bothered with sounds or Growl alerts, simply clicking on the BaseApp icon will show you any unread changes to your various projects. Selecting the item will take you directly to it in your web browser. You can also use BaseApp as a quick link to your various Basecamp project dashboards.
The app is beautifully simple by design, but we wouldn't mind having a few other features. For instance, the ability to auto-upload a file to Basecamp (a la CloudApp's shortcuts) like you can with Freshlog would be really great.
At €7 (about $9 U.S.), BaseApp is a well designed and useful application for the frequent Basecamp user. You can try the app free for 14 days to see if it meets your needs.