The guys at 37signals have just released a web services API for their new web application Backpack. It is said to support 80% of the functionality of the API as is currently planned. The API therefore allows you to create, amend and delete various types of content, and provides some account handling features.

One of the teaser comments asks someone to develop a MacOSX Dashboard widget for the application. I think that’s stupid. The API provides a subset of the functionality and if you’re sat at your computer you might as well use your web browser rather than re-purposing the content into a form suitable for Dashboard.

The best use of the API would be to aggregate or otherwise reorganise and recategorise content. Unfortunately, since the application (and thus the API) doesn’t provide any useful searching or aggregation functions, you’d have to do a lot of work to make a useful Dashboard widget.

Page tags could be useful, but the API to manipulate tags is superficial. For example, to get the ID of a tag, you have to find a page with that tag. There’s no way to get a list of tags or to find pages with a specific tag. Huh?