Like many of you, we’re huge fans of 37signals’ Backpack. It’s a terrific tool for organizing to do items, ideas, files: basically, all those things you need to keep track of.

Here at Stand Alone, we use it for keeping track of upcoming releases, feature requests, and generally anything we need to remember for longer than about 5 minutes (some may argue 2 minutes, but you get my point).

That said, using Backpack on an iPhone has been a frustrating experience. It’s a rich site, designed for a moderately large screen, and what it’s trying to do is really not well suited to Mobile Safari.

Well, that frustration is now over.

Today, after months of development and testing, we’re announcing Satchel, a super fast and functional native Backpack client, developed and optimized for the iPhone. We support all the features of Backpack that you know and love, on device — even when you don’t have access to the network!

With Satchel, you can easily view your Backpack pages:

All of your tags are listed along with the page name, and you can even sort by then, making organization much easier.
Of course, Pages are only the tip of the iceberg with Backpack, so we added a quick way to review page contents at a glance:

Once you’ve got your page contents listed, you can tap to view individual item details, edit and check off items from your lists, or add notes.

What’s even better is that all of this works online and offline: Satchel automatically and seamlessly synchronizes with Backpack’s servers as soon as a network connection becomes available. If you’re on a plane or otherwise ‘offline’, you can easily check all your cached Backpack data, make changes, and add new items. Once you’re back online, Satchel will automatically synchronize all your changes.

Over the development period, I’ve personally found Satchel has made Backpack even more useful than it was before (and I was a heavy Backpack user). For example, I’m using Reminders to keep a To Do list that actively mails or texts me when I need to get something done. And with Satchel, I can quickly check and see what I’ve got to do for the next day or so, then check again on my desktop computer when I get home.

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface here: Satchel offers a lot more of Backpack’s features, right in your iPhone. The best way to see what it can do is to check it out on the AppStore

Although we’re sure you’re going to love Satchel, this is only the first version — we have all sorts of great ideas to make it even better. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you think we’re heading down the wrong path with a feature or function — or, even better, to tell us that you love it as much as we do.