Three terms that came up repeatedly during our San Diego retreat:

Slack
All the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into bigger, concept-driven iterations. We save one of our programmer/designer teams for slack work — small scope things that build up, a bug that needs to be fixed, a quick support assist, etc.

YAGNI
You ain’t gonna need it. It’s easy to get carried away discussing how you could possibly do this, that, or the other thing. It’s harder to step back and ask “Are we really gonna need this?” The answer is usually no.

Low ceremony
When it comes to workflow or policies, stay away from posturing. Just stick loosely to a few guidelines and let good judgement lead you the rest of the way.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Stylized email notifications
We created new email designs for milestones (and 48-hour milestone reminders), file uploads, messages, to-dos, and comments.

New in Basecamp: Post a message via email
You can now email a message directly to a project. This means you can post messages without even being logged in. Just send a message via email from your desktop, web-based email client, or mobile phone, and it’ll post right to Basecamp as a message.

“Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes” is a comprehensive guide to Basecamp
Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes by Patrice-Anne Rutledge is a new book that’s the most comprehensive guide to Basecamp we’ve ever seen. If you want to know everything there is to know about Basecamp, this is the book for you.

A long take is a single, unbroken camera shot that lasts much longer than a typical shot. While the idea’s been around for a long time, it feels like it has extra impact in today’s world of hyper-editing and constant angle changes. Some examples below.

It feels almost cliché to be linking up an Ok Go video at this point, but ya gotta hand it to the band; They have really mastered the art of making “event” videos. Check out this amazing long take video featuring the Notre Dame marching band:

Film directors have long known the power of the long take (Daily Film Dose offers up this list of “The Greatest Long Tracking Shots in Cinema”). One of the best is this scene from “Goodfellas,” where Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco walk through the Copacabana.

More music video examples after the jump.

I walked into a Sprint store today to check out the Palm Pixi. AT&T has been bad enough lately that, while I’m not ready to chuck the iPhone, I’m at least growing curious. Unfortunately “walking in” is about all I could do.

Every smartphone in the Sprint store was locked under glass cabinets. The untouchable phone displays were covered in fake screenshot stickers. Two weary looking gentlemen in polo shirts manned the back counter and a queue of six customers (shoppers?) aimlessly paced the floor, waiting for something to happen.

It took about 30 seconds to realize there was nothing to gain from my store visit. After a quick round to be sure I didn’t miss a demo unit somewhere, I turned back to the street. Is this typical of Sprint stores?

Compare this experience to the Apple store. iPhones and iPods are less than six feet away from the entrance door. All you have to do is reach out and grab one. Salespeople meander around you, instead of you around them. A total Apple newbie can go from curious to salivating in about 90 seconds in that environment.

Can you imagine if Apple locked their products under glass cabinets? Or put stickers with screenshots over their displays? Who makes these decisions?

1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2. You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3. I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4. I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.

Via Joshua Kaufman.

I’m excited to give a talk at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I’m going to walk through Christopher Alexander’s design theory and explain how to apply it to everyday web app UI work. Alexander’s book Notes on the Synthesis of Form had a huge influence on me early in my career at 37signals. It’s going to be a lot of fun to share key points from that book with an audience for the first time. I hope you can come out to see it.

Where:
MFA Interaction Design Department
132 W 21st Street, 6 Floor
New York City

When:
Wednesday, April 7
6:30-8:30PM

See the event page at the SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design program to RSVP.

UPDATE: The talk is now sold-out.

Startups need people able and willing of doing the actual work. They need programmers, designers, and eventually folks to do marketing, support, and more. What they don’t need, though, is someone who’s just going to be The Idea Guy.

You know the type. It’s the “this thing is going to be Facebook meets Flickr, but for dogs! If we can just get 1% of the online dog market, we’ll be rich!” spiel. All idea, usually no money, and hardly any functional skills that’ll help build or launch the damn thing.

On the face and the facts of it, it’d be easy to turn down The Idea Guy. He wants you to work for very little or free in return for a smaller-than-his slice of the pie in the end. That end very rarely happens. But the energy and the big dreams can be dangerously alluring. I know, I fell for it more than once.

The truth is that most everyone has plenty of ideas that could work out to be great businesses. The kicker is most often the right execution, that they’d be responsible for anyway, at the right time, which is almost impossible to predict. The value of The Perfect Idea is very small indeed.

That doesn’t mean it’s useless to have big ideas and plenty of enthusiasm. If you’re that guy, you’ve got a great start. Now pick up a functional skill and help build it your damn self.

Time: 41:20 | 03/02/2010 | Download MP3

Like this episode? Please share it with your friends:

The new business book from 37signals
REWORK hits stores on March 9. This episode features an extended conversation all about the book. We discuss why we wrote it, what it was like working with our publisher, the writing process, the illustrations, the cover, and more.

Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast. Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS.