“Fast Food Nation” was revealing. “Kitchen Confidential” was juicy. But wow, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is something else. The best book on food I’ve ever read.

In the book, Pollan shoots a pig, hunts for mushrooms, slaughters a chicken, works as a farmhand, examines industrial and local farms in person, explains how we’ve come to be dominated by corn, shows how grass is the key to life on a farm, explores the connection between oil and food, and much more (PDF of the introduction and first chapter).

But as I was reading it, something kept gnawing at me: how terrible the title of the book is. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” Yawn.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” part sounds like a math problem. Plus, omnivore is a word that most people won’t even get. And “A Natural History of Four Meals” isn’t any better. Sounds like a biology textbook.

The book is thrilling to read, intensely scary, and a real call to arms. So why is the title so lame? (Sure, it sold well, but that’s because the content is so strong. I’d argue those sales came despite the title, not because of it.)

Moving to simple and strong
Perhaps Pollan felt similarly, because the title of his latest book packs a lot more of a punch: “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.” Simple and strong.

He even comes up with a short, tight call to action: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” No way to miss the point there. He explains it in this article.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

Great to see a title and call to action that are as clear and cogent as the rest of what Pollan writes.

There’s a lesson here for all writers: Spend as much time on your titles, subtitles, headlines, summaries, and calls to action as you do on the bulk of your content. If you don’t hook readers upfront, they may never dive in and get to the rest of your message.

Creating color schemes in Basecamp just got easier. Before, you had to understand complicated hex codes to customize your colors. Now anybody can choose colors with a shiny new color picker. Kudos to Sam for the extra attention to detail on the color picker. We think it’s solid and it’s the best color picker we’ve used on any web application. Picking colors in Basecamp is a lot of fun thanks to the live feedback, so load up your Settings tab, click “Color Scheme” and take it for a spin.

Another natural wonder. This time brought to you by ants. Trap-jaw ants use their jaws to propel themselves into the air to evade predators. They can achieve heights of just over 8cm. That translates into a 40ft vertical for an average size human.

Backpack has always allowed you to share pages via email, but the person on the receiving end had to have a Backpack account before they could view the page. We were never really happy about how that worked. We finally did something about it. Big thanks to Jeremy for making this happen.

Now you can share Backpack pages with anyone in the world via email — even if they don’t have a Backpack account. They don’t even need to know what Backpack is.

It’s the quickest and best way we know to share a functional web page or informational page with someone (or some people). Share to-dos, photos, notes, whatever. Pages you share via email are fully functional. Multiple people can collaborate on the page together by adding new list items, checking them off, adding a note, a file, a photo, etc.

And if they do decide to sign up for Backpack, they page will be pulled right into their account as a shared page. It’s all automatic.

We hope you find this enhancement useful. If you don’t already have a Backpack account, sign up for one today.

I can’t get over how ugly my new running shoes are (click for larger versions):

So comfortable inside, why so ugly outside? Unfortunately, few of the other choices were much better. Apparently sneakers must be FUTURISTIC and have 593 different elements in order to prove they were DESIGNED.

So I went ahead and bought them anyway. Function over form + I didn’t want to spend all day shopping for shoes that I’m just going to use when I run. Too bad. I’d prefer the minimalist look of a pair of Stan Smiths over this overproduced crap any day.

Hmm…I do want to run away from them every time I look down. So maybe it’s a motivational technique.

Artyfactory has a great piece on Picasso’s reduction of a detailed drawing of a bull into an abstract basic shape using just twelve pen strokes.

It starts here:

And ends here:

The interesting stuff is what comes in-between.

I can’t even begin to imagine the complexity of rolling out something as big as the iPhone 3G/2.0. You have to coordinate retail, marketing, web services, support, manufacturing, shipping, and many of other business and tech units months in advance.

They all have to be ready by a a date determined by guesswork, pressure, and wishful thinking. Which means that you essentially have to make the call that the product is going to be done long before it actually is.

For the iPhone 1.0 launch, that bet paid off. The software for the phone felt solid. Everything just worked well. Fondling with the phone for the first time was intoxicating. It just tasted so incredibly Apple.

With the iPhone 2.0 launch, not so much. I’ve been using the phone every day for about a week now and it just isn’t up to the great expectations set by the first version. Everything feels so incredibly fragile. Here are just a few of the griefs I’ve felt:

• Annoying delays all over the place.
• Changing to the SMS view can take more than 10 seconds at times.
• Transitions between apps are being dropped entirely or cut short (the latter looks like a UI stutter).
• It some times requires 3 clicks on the fast-forward button in iTunes to get a response.
• The screen will freeze for 4-5 seconds not accepting any input, then replay ALL your feverous tapping when it finally returns.
• Some times the keyboard will not keep up with your input (and I’m not that fast of a typer).
• I’ve had applications crash numerous times.
• The entire phone has crashed twice.
• Restarting the phone kinda helps some of these problems, but not for long and it feels so dirty and Windows-like to do.

Now all of this could probably have been overlooked and forgiven if the payback from the new features was immense, but to me, it just isn’t. I have two screens of applications installed, but don’t really use them that much.

3rd party apps doesn’t make up for it
Twitterific is nice, but not much of a step up from just using the iPhone-optimized web version. I like WeatherBug too to get a doppler radar reading, but nothing a bookmark to weather.com didn’t do almost as well. I’ve installed but not actually used AIM, NetNewsWire, Yelp, Movies.app, Facebook, PayPal, NYTimes, Light, Sketches, and VNC yet.

It seems like the biggest new thing is the games. I’ve been playing some Tetris, some Super Monkey Ball, and a few others. And they’re really impressive! The graphics are great and controlling with the accelerometer often works better than you’d think.

3G is bliss and bastard all in one
The hardware features are also a nice improvement. The built-in GPS is fast and accurate. The 3G is a lot more mixed bag, though. When it works, it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s so much faster than Edge and really takes the experience that 2.0-like step up. The voice quality is also significantly up. But it’s just so incredibly unreliable.

Getting a 3G signal in central Chicago is like playing the corner on roulette. And when it drops back to edge, you lose all your chips of joy. I actually kinda like getting ultra fast just 20% of time and slowpoke speeds 80% of the time less than just being slow always.

As to double down on the insult, the battery life is absolutely terrible with 3G turned on. You’re absolutely required to recharge every day and it’s not unlikely that you’ll flame out in the middle of a day either with heavy use.

The cumulative effect of small problems is exponential
Combined, it’s a rather big disappointment. I’m surprised just how much impact the small griefs have when they add up to a lack of confidence in the system. It’s a great example of the cumulative effects of problems. They have an exponential damage on the experience.

And I haven’t even gone into much detail on how ridiculously bad the buying experience is compared to the first time around. Jason and I bought a EVDO card in a Sprint store the other day and we spent probably 30 minutes there. We joked about how lame that experience was. Buying the iPhone 3G took almost as long and felt almost as bad.

That’s not to say that the iPhone isn’t the best phone I’ve ever had. It is. By a wide margin. But the 2.0 launch itself has been a big disappointment and that’s too bad.

It feels a little like Apple got swept up in knocking down every single detraction point from 1.0 that they lost sight of what everyone loved about the first version. Yes, it got cheaper (not really), faster (some times), installable apps, and GPS, but it lost a bit of Apple soul in the process.

Thsrs

Thsrs helps you get briefer.

If only there were a service that helps with the struggle of rewriting a 146-letter message to fit in a 140 character limit. Well now there is: Thsrs, the thesaurus that only gives you synonyms shorter than the word you’re looking up. Just enter one of the longer words in your message, and Thsrs will suggest shorter words to use instead.

Posterous

Posterous, a Tumblr-like service, lets you post things online fast using email.

You can attach any type of file and we’ll post it along with the text of your email. We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3’s, documents and video links.

We’ve been wanting to offer regularly scheduled webcast tours (or is it a webinar??) of our products for a while now, but we’ve been unable to find the right piece of software on the Mac to get it done.

Here’s what we want: We want to be able to share our screen and our voice and allow up to 100 (?) people at a time to follow along in their web browsers. People who wanted to participate would go to a URL to watch the presentation. Voice could be handled via the net or via a coordinated conference call.

At the end we could do a Q&A session. We’d need some way to moderate the questions so everyone doesn’t jump in at once. We could ultimately just take questions via text/email and then pick a few to answer.

We’re aware of services like GoToMeeting, but you can’t initiate the webcast from a Mac. You can watch along on a Mac, but you can’t seem to broadcast from a Mac. Adobe Captivate looks interesting too, but you can only have a max of 5 people on the webcast.

Anyone have any ideas? Anything I’m overlooking? Thanks for your help.

Jason Fried

July 31, Denver: New Denver Ad Club Keynote (register online)

September 2-5, Boston: Business of Software Conference

September 16-19, NYC: Web 2.0 Expo

September 23, Chicago: Illinois ITA Speaking of Success Series

October 7-8, Chicago: IDEA Conference

October 13, Chicago: An Event Apart

October 14-17, Providence RI: BIF-4

David Heinemeier Hansson

July 21-23, Half Moon Bay California: Fortune Brainstorm Tech

September 2-4, Berlin: RailsConf Europe

September 16-19, NYC: Web 2.0 Expo

September 20, Chicago: WindyCityRails

October 20-22, Barcelona: European Ecommerce Conference

Ryan Singer

November 3-4, NYC: Future of Web Design