Bookmarklet to Toggle Lists Display in Basecamp

If you’re in the creative/web industry, there’s a pretty good chance you love to hate Basecamp. It has so many things going right for it, but since it’s a tool we often use every day, all day, it’s deficiencies become glaringly obvious to us. A while back (looks like October 7, 2013), I created a couple bookmarklets for basecamp users which allow you to highlight tasks which are assigned to you (or other users). I use this on a daily basis to quickly get a sense of the tasks assigned to me (or others) in any particular Basecamp project.

Today I spent some time giving those bookmarklets some love, so when you navigate between Basecamp pages, the highlights will persist/carry over. This can be done fairly easily because of the way Basecamp loads pages asynchronously. Though a small improvement, It keeps me from having to click that bookmarklet every time I navigate to a new page or task list. If you’re already using them, I recommend you head on over to that blog post and re-grab them.

While the highlighter bookmarklets are pretty handy, there is another glaring weakness in the Basecamp UX; that is navigating around when there are a large number of tasks and task-lists. And if you think just getting around is challenging, I’m sure you’re very familiar with the pain of moving tasks between giant task lists!

To alleviate that burden, I created another bookmarklet that injects some UI elements/features for toggling Basecamp list display. Very handy for unruly projects, or trying to drag and drop that pesky task from one list to another. Just like the new & improved highlighters, these list toggles will also persist between asynchronous page-loads.

There are two bookmarklets based on your preference. The first will minify/hide all the lists when you first click it, making hidden lists the default. If you prefer that the lists remain in view until clicking the toggle, then grab the second version.

If you would prefer that these UI improvements be ON all of the time (vs using bookmarklets), I recommend you read the other post, as it documents how to do that download the Chrome Extension.

The source JS files are on Github, so feel free to fork or submit pull requests!