Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Backpack
Backpack helps researcher working in imaging of ancient texts
“Where Backpack really shines is in its ability to share data. It lets me pull together notes, images, and lists to quickly share results with colleagues in a clean, professional layout. Since I work in imaging and visualization, galleries let me easily share images of all sizes with a small preview and some optional descriptive text, on the same page with any other information I want to get across. It’s only a short step up from there to have a page other people can readily collaborate on.”
Basecamp
[Case Study] Leading martial arts site: “Basecamp is a complete necessity for us”
“As a start-up business (growing from nothing last year to being now one of the leading online martial arts communities) our team of 4 constantly sing the praises of Basecamp. The fact we are not yet office based and are all working remotely (often odd hours) has made Basecamp a complete necessity for us. The days of a disorganised million emails flying back and forth are gone thankfully!”
Further clarification on the IE 6 phase out
“It’s unlikely that anyone using IE 6 with Basecamp will run into any problems in the near future, but it’s important to keep in mind that any future upgrades might not work with IE 6.”
Video: One Year of Using Basecamp
“I can’t imagine managing web projects without it. I want to share with you a fun video he did showcasing the power of messaging through Basecamp. We exploited the tool as much as it would let us, to stay on the same page with designers, developers, project managers and representatives from several different departments throughout the school.”
Campus Technology reports on Carnegie Mellon’s use of Basecamp
Carnegie Mellon University is using Basecamp to manage centralized information technology projects.
Highrise
Jolt Magazine: Highrise is “a jewel of an application”
“If what you need is simple contact & task management, this is a jewel of an application. The workflow is seamless.”
Getting Real
Getting Real: Not just for software developers
Jim Semple, Vice President of Brandt Engineered Products: “Getting Real is jam packed with sound business advice that could apply to a service business, a manufacturing operation or running an airline just as easily as it applies to building a successful web application. It’s all about people and leading them toward optimum effectiveness. We manufacture heavy equipment for customers around the world. In addition to sound engineering, good communications and effective decision making makes the difference between hitting the target and missing the mark. Getting people to perform at optimum levels on a continuous basis is the challenge. Getting Real tells you why it’s important and how to do it. Great book! Read this book and you’ll dodge a lot of potholes on the road to success. I can’t wait for the sequel. I’ll need copies for all my managers.”
Multiple products
The Daily Netizen: Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise are “must-have” web tools for telecommuters
Jessica Merritt of The Daily Netizen just published a list of the 100 Must-Have Web Tools for Telecommuters. We’re proud to say a few 37signals apps made the list.
The secret to writing a successful to-do list
Gina Trapani, the founding editor and lead blogger for Lifehacker: “There are lots of ways you can make a to-do list into something that actually gets done. Often when people get to the point when they are writing it, they are doing a brain dump. They just have to just get things down on paper. But to get to the point where you’re checking things off, you want to make it a do-able to-do list. Things need to be as easy for yourself to do as possible. So you have to break things down into tasks. We sabotage ourselves by writing down things like “Plan the anniversary party” or “Learn French.” Those are projects, not tasks and don’t belong on your to-do list.”
Keith
on 18 Sep 08Out of curiosity how many people do you have still using ie6?
The current market share is about 24.5% (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp) which isn’t significantly less than ie7, but marks a significant step in that it has only been since May that ie7 has held any market share over ie6.
I’m struggling with this myself right now for some projects. Do you draw “a line in the sand?” Do you let your logs guide you as to when you’ve hit that critical mass for knowing when you can depricate the support and THEN make a stand against the stragglers?
Obviously you want to honor your users with the rewards of standards compliance and nicer features that ie6 won’t support. But how are you guys making that call?
Lazlo
on 19 Sep 08At this point I suspect most of the “stragglers” are companies that took advantage of an internal browser monoculture and broadly adopted IE6 as a platform for in-house applications. There’s no easy upgrade path for those organizations, so if that’s a significant chunk of your audience, you’re going to be supporting IE6 for a while yet.
This discussion is closed.