If you design web sites, order this book. Informative, fun, direct, clear, practical. It’s everything you want in this kind of book. This is the first book from A Book Apart (from the Zeldman crew who bring you A List Apart). Ships soon, in June.

They put it perfectly:

The HTML5 spec is 900 pages and hard to read. HTML5 for Web Designers is 85 pages and fun to read. Easy choice.

We just launched a redesign of the 37signals Job Board. From start to finish we spent 10 days on the project. Jamie Dihiansan designed it and Josh Peek programmed it. We love how it turned out.

We had a few goals for the redesign:

1. A fresh coat of paint. We didn’t want to add or remove any key functionality, but we wanted to redesign the look and feel to freshen it up. Modernized, cleaner, and clearer. We also experimented with Typekit for the first time.
2. Remove distractions and make our Job Board customers the stars. With our product logos, a big black footer, and our standard header, the old design was too much about us and not enough about the companies listing their jobs on the Job Board.
3. A better purchasing process. We wanted to make the purchasing flow friendlier and easier to use – especially the preview step.
4. WYSIWYG. We wanted to add WYSIWYG editing to the job description field. This gives people the tools to make their ads — especially ads with bullet lists — look nicer.
5. A proper thank you. The old Job Board dropped people back on the home page after they posted their job. The thank you only came in the form of an email. The new design thanks them properly and gives them some helpful information and tools to promote their position.

Job listings BEFORE the redesign:

Job listings AFTER the redesign:

Since January, we have been experimenting with a new way of working. Two programmers and one designer form a team and take on projects in short, mostly two week, iterations. It’s been a great success so far and has resulted in a huge list of new features across all 37signals products. But after two full terms of new features, one of our teams decided to start the third term with a little spring cleaning.

The three of us had something different to bring to this term — each of us had been focusing mostly on customer support recently. Jamis and Jeff were fresh off terms in our support programmer role and I had spent the last few months working daily to help customers on our Answers forum. That gave us a unique perspective on our products. We came together having each experienced all of the little things that can be big headaches for our customers. So we spent the past two weeks fixing, polishing, re-writing, and improving the places that we’d seen the most confusion from customers first hand.

Here is some of what we were able to accomplish:

• Re-wrote and re-designed the sign in error states so that we could explain in context why someone’s login may not be working.
• Improved the sign in link to make it more visible when creating new product accounts.
• Added better detection and prevention of duplicate signups.
• Cleaned up and fixed various display issues with 37signals ID email notifications.
• Modernized the sign in screens using CSS instead of transparent PNG images.

• When inviting new users, detect duplicates. This warns admins that they may be trying to invite someone who is already on their account avoiding multiple sign in confusion.
• Stop trying to automatically create users on an integrated Campfire account and simplify the process—members enter chats as themselves, non-members enter as guests.
• Fixed that the responsible party pulldown for to-dos shouldn’t include people who can’t see private items
• Fixed a longstanding issue with reordering of To-do templates.
• Corrected the decimal precision of the total number of hours displayed on time pages.
• Resolved various display issues, from text formatting to icon alignment.

• Updated monospaced font styles to render more consistently and attractively across browsers and platforms.
• Updated and improved iCal and API authentication copy.

• Exposed better invoice options, such as the email address and ‘Bill to’ field on the Account tab.
• Introduced per-user iCal feed to fix a recurring time bug whenever DST changes.
• Fixed an annoying issue with editing multi-day events that could result in the start date being incorrectly set to next year.

Improving our products isn’t just about new features. Polishing, re-writing, fixing, and improving existing features can do just as much to make them better and more enjoyable to use. Many of these fixes were directly related to repeated questions or suggestions from our customers so we’ll be keeping an eye on support to measure their impact.

If you’re interested in keeping up with changes to our products as they happen, you can see them all on our 37signals change history page or follow @37changes for our Twitter feed of product updates.

Diaspora, the “open Facebook alternative” (NYT story for background if you aren’t familiar), has raised Over $170,000 from over 4600 people in just a few weeks. All for an idea.

That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. Here’s the problem: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise.

They have too much money

They’re at $170,000 today (Sunday, May 16, 2010). They’ll likely continue to pile up the donations until their Kickstarter campaign ends 16 days from now. All this money without an actual product is a liability. Money gives them too much time and too much comfort to take on a fast moving incumbent like Facebook. Their cash to code ratio is out of whack. A good enough first version will take longer to produce with $170K than it would have with $0K.

The spotlight is on too early

You want attention after you’re good, not before. Obscurity is your friend when you’re just starting — especially when you don’t even have a product yet. You don’t need the pressure of outside opinion or the press breathing down your neck before you have anything to show. Millions of eyes — including your competition — watching you every step of the way doesn’t help. All this attention is a distraction. Ship, then seek the spotlight.

Expectations are too high

Some people are really pissed at Facebook right now. Those people are looking for a way to channel this negative energy into a movement. Along comes Diaspora. Diaspora becomes their horse in the race. They want that horse to win. They believe it can win. Their unlimited hopes and dreams of the anti-Facebook are transferred to Diaspora. Diaspora becomes everything and anything to anyone who wants to believe. How can anyone deliver on boundless expectations? Diaspora can’t match the fantasy of Diaspora.

I love the underdog, but I fear for the product-less underdog that has all the wrong things at the wrong time.

I think they would have been better off releasing something first. Let people play with it. Let people see that it’s possible. Then drum up press and public support. Until there’s something real to use, fantasy will just get in the way.

The largest school in the world is run (and taught) by one man. Simple, direct, clear, no frills, no tricks. Just a computer blackboard, YouTube, a great attitude, a gift for straightforward teaching, and a love of sharing. Sal Khan is a new hero. Find out more about the Khan Academy.

Sal Khan at Gel 2010 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Highlights from this week’s 37signals staff posts at Twitter.

@uptonic: Photo: The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook http://tumblr.com/xbf9vlz9c

@rjs: The money-to-code ratio at Diaspora is out of whack. Having a pile of money so you can “focus” on a project means nothing.

@mattlinderman: Need to edit an MP3 track? You can trim tracks in iTunes itself. Get info > Options tab > use Start and Stop times. http://bit.ly/cloLWW

@rjs: I wish iTunes could exclude artists that only appear on compilations from artist view.

@jasonfried: Highly recommending “Revising Prose”. The best book on writing & editing I’ve ever read: http://amzn.to/a3xxRx

@joshpeek: Its obvious when developers don’t use the software they create

@bitsweat: We need better domain language for third-party authorization. Consumer/client/app/agent are wishy-washy and generic.

@jasonfried: Christian Heilmann interviews @dhh in London about REWORK: http://bit.ly/cFv8Lg

Excerpt from Episode #13: Addressing criticism of 37signals (Part 1 of 2) of the 37signals Podcast (transcript):

David: That’s the main push-back that we have is not that venture capital is bad; It’s that venture capital is bad when applied to businesses that do not have excessive capital needs. Because then it creates all these sort of distortions, where the money has to be spent and it’ll have to be spent on, well, hiring more people, because that’s really the one major expense that web startups have.

And then you get into all these sort of problems where you have a vastly over-staffed startup, because that’s what you have to spend your money on, so that’s what you will spend your money on. And you get, oftentimes, big, crufty, overbuilt products, instead of just focusing the same idea on a much smaller team that doesn’t require millions of venture capital and can get out the door with something simpler and build a real business around it.

Jason: Maybe once you have a success, once you have customers, once you have a track record, once you have a clear path, and then you feel like, for whatever reason, you need more money to do something else, then, OK, maybe it makes sense for some companies. So expanding operations, once you actually have operations, may make sense.

But you don’t expand operations upfront when you have nothing. You first build operations. You first build for a few years. You first build some profits and some customers before you want to do that.

David: Would you go out and start, let’s say, 500 McDonald’s before you even know what the menu is, before you’ve even designed your hit burger yet? No, you wouldn’t. You would run one franchise until you’ve really honed how that thing is going to work, how a single store can be profitable, can make a space for itself.

Some of the images we’ve been sharing lately in our internal Campfire chat room.

David DeSandro overlays black paths with dots on top of the screenshots. You hover a dot to get part of the story so there’s a narrative weaving down the whole portfolio. Pretty neat.

First images from the solar dynamics observatory.

Pretty type on Oscar and Ewan About page. Seriously beautiful stuff on rest of the site too (like this legal pad).