We started with two simple needs: sharing project information and sharing files.

In both categories, there are lots and lots of applications. We found that in general, the project apps had far too many features or didn’t provide an enjoyable user experience. Basecamp, of course, was an exception for project apps. It’s a marvel--but we still felt it had more features than would be useful for our team.

Basing our work on the idea that least is most, we went off to make it happen. This started with a spec of about seven pages of features and a couple of photoshop drawings. After a lot of research, we were able to get the spec down to one page and we didn’t even have to shrink the font.

We chose Adobe’s AIR framework since we wanted the application to feel like part of your day. Going to a website seemed unnecessarily clunky if we could wrap it up with a bow; developing a desktop app seemed inconvenient for rolling out changes. AIR was the best of both worlds and free to boot.

You can hook up either app to any backend you want, but we decided to go with Amazon’s S3 as the main repository. The zero cost of entry is nice for everybody and so is the lack of support headaches. But you can patch in whatever you want, pretty much.

Builds for the file sharing app will be available for testing on 21 April 2008 and builds for the project app will be available for testing on 1 June 2008. We’ll post detailed app descriptions soon!