On one of those most scintillating life hacks threads you see everywhere these days, seeking a portable Mac+PC calendar application that would sync with iCal, someone suggested BitPal. It does look pretty neat. For to-dos and simple reminders, you could use Backpack, but it doesn't do full calendaring. (I guess because Basecamp does.)
I moved some to-do lists from [Ta-da List][tada] to Backpack this week, because 37signals put drag-and-drop reordering into Backpack but not Ta-da List. I would have thought they'd make it easier to import into Backpack--you can upgrade to a paid Backpack account--but no, I had to copy the text of the list to an email and email it into Backpack. I had to go back and fix the markup I'd used. I guess that's not a bad plan, as I had to do the same thing with a list I was keeping in static HTML anyway.
So far it's pretty nice. I couldn't use BitPal for those lists because I share them with other folks. I could do that with Ta-da List, but--drag and drop reordering. I haven't used Backpack's other data types yet, and I still wish it had nested lists like Sproutliner.
BitPal is one of those cool tiny single-task self-contained apps I was always looking for when I was in school, switching between lab computers with my life on an Iomega Zip disk. My last year I finally got a USB drive (and we finally got PCs with exposed USB ports), and I still carry a (tiny awesome-looking) USB flash drive with me, but I hardly use it because everything's on the laptop or network these days.
Backpack has the additional advantage of not having a camel-cased name.
