Today we released some improvements to the People and Permission screens in Basecamp. We’ve improved the process for adding new people to a company within a project and we redesigned the Permissions screen with a number of subtle usability improvements. You’ll also find a new Administrators screen to easily control which people in the account holder’s company have Administrator powers. Check out the video below to see the changes.

The redesigned Permissions screen wasn’t really a redesign. 90% of the screen looks and works the same. We worked a lot with subtle changes in text size, positioning, and color in order to bring more clarity and spaciousness to the screen.

Here’s the old version:

And the new redesign:

Continued…

A couple of Getting Realish ideas spotted in Best Life magazine:

Greg Gianforte is the author of “Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money.” In Follow Your Dream, he advises throwing out your five-year plan and focusing on building something now instead.

Gianforte describes how to build a company from sales rather than enlisting professional financiers. The secret is to stop sweating your five-year plan and start moving the product from day one. If your business idea requires more money than you have at hand, then shrink the idea.

“An entrepreneur getting started doesn’t need a $100 million idea,” says Gianforte. “A $1 million idea is enough. The beauty of a $1 million idea is that big companies don’t care about it. Find a niche within a niche.”

The same issue of the magazine also includes Mark Cuban’s Three Rules for Building a Company. He writes, “Do everything you can to avoid taking money.”

Sweat equity is the best equity. “Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.”

Related Getting Real essays:
Don’t Do Dead Documents
Race to Running Software
Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope
Fund Yourself

Most embedded audio players offer a tiny player with the basics: play/pause and a progress bar.

While this design works great for the casual listener, Soundcloud has another audience in mind. Musicians, producers and sound engineers want to do more than listen to a track. They want to provide feedback on specific details. The bass at 2:36 needs more compression. There’s a mic out of phase at 4:01. Can we try another patch for this one chord in the bridge?

In order to allow this kind of collaboration, Alex and the guys at Soundcloud could have used a standard player and tossed a comment stream below it. Instead they decided to expand the player and allow commenters to add notes directly inside on the waveform itself. The result is pretty cool. People can post tracks and receive a flurry of comments attached directly to the waves.

The player spans the full width of the screen, so it’s easier to set the playhead at the exact spot you want. Commentor’s avatars appear in the bottom of the player, and their comments pop up on hover.

I like how these guys set out to build a collaboration site for music makers, and what did they concentrate on? The music player. It cuts straight to the epicenter (more).

They also scratched my persistant itch for larger link targets in their “Actions” section of the sidebar:

Soundcloud is still in private beta, but Signal vs. Noise readers can check it out with this link: http://soundcloud.com/guestlist/signalvsnoise .

I was in a three-hour meeting yesterday. I’m meeting averse, you know that. But one of the things I liked about this meeting was when the guy in charge stopped someone mid-sentence and said “Don’t say everyone or no one. It doesn’t mean anything.”

We all do this. We try to justify our position by saying “No one knows…” or “Everyone knows…” or some derivative thereof. When you throw around these extremes you weaken your point. There is no such thing as everyone or no one. Don’t justify your position by putting an unjustifiable abstraction at the core.

Even “Most people” is a bad one. “Many people” isn’t as bad, but it’s still loaded. I find myself saying it all the time. “Some people” is better. A clear “these people” is best.

So when you’re making a point or taking a position, watch out everyone or no one — they aren’t really there.

When I see stuff like this I’m 1. filled with envy, 2. filled with envy, 3. hungry. More wonderfulness can be found at eatPES.

Apple apologizes and compensates for MobileMe downtime and their loose definition of “push.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
Why The Demo Coach switched from Salesforce to Highrise
“To my surprise, Highrise turned out to be an amazing SAAS, which allows us to have basically the same functionality as Salesforce. The biggest differences to me is that the user interface is much more enjoyable to work with and the cost is a fraction of what I am used to paying for CRM.”

Basecamp
Coming soon: Outpost will let you manage Basecamp projects on your iPhone
Outpost (coming in August 2008 from Morfunk) promises to let you manage your Basecamp projects on your iPhone: “Take notes away from the office. Delegate tasks from the train. Check on deadlines. Upload photos to projects. Anywhere.”

Entrepreneur/Author at CNNMoney.com: “Basecamp brought a ‘best practices’ rigor to my business”
“Basecamp brought a ‘best practices’ rigor to my business. It gave us a common nomenclature for projects and allowed us to organize our content workflow into headings like Overview, Messages, To-Do’s, Milestones and more, tied to each project.”

Backpack
Blue Flavor thinks the Backpack Journal is “fan-frickin-tastic”
“About a month ago I read about Backpack’s new Journal feature. It seemed very interesting and after about a week of playing with it, I decided to get the rest of the team to try it out. Now we’ve got an amazing status tool (ala Twitter) AND an ongoing record of what everyone has an is working on. I find this really useful in planning my resources and projects. It’s also got all sorts of side benefits; keeping the team in touch in a low-noise way, reducing distraction by allowing people to announce that they’re busy. ‘Hey don’t bug me! I’m heads-down!!’”

Getting Real
vi.sualize.us creator on Getting Real and building an app in his spare time with no budget
“I developed the site in five months using only my spare time (nights, holidays…) and $0 budget…I started to read it and after a few chapters I couldn’t believe how lucky I was: a lot of the questions I was doing myself during the development, could finally have answers, or at least guidance! Your book came in at the right moment, completely out of the blue.”

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When 37signals first started out, we didn’t make products. We did client work.

From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention (eNormicom), experiments with new ways of selling our services (37express), ways to show off our design thinking (37Better Project), etc.

Here are a few of the key non-client projects that enabled us to build up an audience before we launched Basecamp:

The 37signals manifesto
We started with a philosophy. The 37signals manifesto, which explained our approach to design, was our original site from 1999-2001. This collection of 37 nuggets of online philosophy and design wisdom was our initial “declaration of intent.”

We’ve changed a lot over the years. But the manifesto set the table for what followed. Usability, valuing people over org-charts, simplicity, speed, anti-jargon, small teams, emphasis on copywriting, eliminating bells and whistles, etc. It was all there, in the manifesto, back in 1999.

The 37Better Project
In “The 37Better Project,” we’d take frustrating online experiences and show how we thought they could be better.

Complaining is easy. Offering solutions is the tough part. When we have an idea about how to improve a specific web site or concept, we post our pro bono “better” design comp here.

The 37Better Project included: 37BetterBank, 37BetterFedEx, 37BetterPayPal, 37BetterMotors, 37BetterGoogle. Some examples (click image for full size version):

eNormicom
eNormicom was a parody site we made mocking the new media branding foolishness that was all the rage during the web bubble.

It takes a lot to differentiate your brand in today’s “me too” world of electronic business solutions. At eNormicom, we create and develop campaigns that break through the chatter clearly and consistently.

“Homing In on ‘Intelligent’ Web Design” is an article in the NY Times about the site.

Continued…

Gordian worms live inside crickets. Once fully grown, they inject chemicals into the cricket’s brain, brainwashing it and forcing it to kill itself by jumping into water. Once in water, the worm wriggles out of the writhing body and swims off in search of a mate.

[Thanks: JD]

Fashion label Madewell has a really cool site.

90% of it is photos of the products and each piece in the collection has a video showing a person moving in it. Overall it’s a beautiful example of minimal nav and total focus on the content.

Also, Flash is used in a refined way. There’s a lot of hovers and interactivity, but it’s not too much. Just enough to make things interesting.

And the deeper you dig, the more neat stuff you’ll find: This scrapbook-style nav is fun and this calendar is really fresh too. Kudos Madewell!

[FYI: J. Crew launched Madewell as “a hipper, little sister” of the brand.]