This weekend we flipped the switch on Ta-da List for the iPhone. If you have an iPhone, just visit tadalist.com and you’ll see the iPhone version. You can access the standard web version with your desktop web browser. Both versions share data and lists.

Here’s what it looks like:

Your lists.

A sample list.

Tapping an item to mark it done, edit, or delete.

We hope you like it.

Some recent postings at the 37signals Job Board:

SquadGod Fantasy Football is looking for a Lead Developer (PHP/MySQL) in London (W10), UK.

Milkshake is looking for a Front-End Technologist in Austin, TX.

zootoo llc is looking for a CSS/XHTML layout specialist in NY Metro area.

NEMO Design is looking for an Art Director/Senior Interactive Designer in Portland, Oregon.

The New York Times is looking for a Front End Technologist CSS web developer with AJAX in New York.

Google and YouTube Veteran Founded Online Video Start-up is looking for a Senior UI Software Engineer-Ruby-on-Rails in San Francisco.

Fotolog, Inc. is looking for a Senior Web Designer in New York City.

IDEO is looking for a Web Developer in Palo Alto, CA.

Precision Flight Controls is looking for a Firmware Designer in Sacramento, CA.

Electronic Arts is looking for a User Experience Specialist in Redwood City, CA.

Blackbaud is looking for an Interaction/User Interface Designer in Charleston, SC.

Philips Design is looking for a User Interface Designer in Andover, MA.

BuzzFeed is looking for a Business Development Director in New York, NY.

New York Magazine is looking for a Project Manager / Product Development in New York, NY.

Songbird is looking for a Senior Developer Evangelist in San Francisco, CA.

“On Writing” posts show interesting copy from around the web.

David Simon
David Simon, Baltimore-based author, journalist, and writer-producer of HBO’s The Wire, on the goal he has in mind when he writes:

Whoever the average reader was of my newspaper, I never wrote for him. I always wrote for the people living the event. And I wanted not to be embarassed in front of them as a writer.

So if I’m writing about somebody who is struggling with addiction, I want other people who have struggled with addiction to say “Yeah, you got it right.” Or people who are police doing a certain job, I wanted them to say “Yeah, you got it right.” Or a street level drug trafficker, I wanted them to say “that was real”.

Pamela Slim
Pamela Slim is a consultant who has worked with clients like Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Charles Schwab, and Sun. Her About page talks about her work with San Francisco gang members.

Despite lots of corporate experience, I learned some of my best coaching skills from gang members on the streets of San Francisco. For ten years, while working with corporations during the day, I was also the Executive Director of Omulu Capoeira Group, a non-profit martial arts organization. Through my work with Omulu, I developed innovative gang-prevention programs, and often walked the streets of some of the most gang-ridden parts of the City, talking with teenagers and encouraging them to join our program.

You can imagine the positive body language I got from them at first – crossed arms, glares and puffed out chests. But since I had worked with teens for so long, I knew that underneath they were vulnerable, bright kids who just needed some positive encouragement and structure.

One day when I walked into the conference room of a corporation to do some work with the executive team, I noticed similar body language from the executives, although it was a bit more subtle. So I told them so.

“Wow – you look just like the gang members that I work with. They look at me like that when they want to intimidate me. What’s up?”

After a tense silence (when I was wondering if I had finally lost my mind), they burst out laughing and immediately changed their demeanor.

What I learned from the kids is that the worst thing you can do when confronted with hostility is to appear afraid. The best thing is just to act relaxed and confident and start talking. Ask questions. Gain trust. Pretty soon the walls come down and rapport develops.

Are we headed towards a world dominated by amateurish art, truthiness, photos of cute animals, and video clips of people being hit in the nuts? That’s the fear expressed in The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture (review), a new book by Andrew Keen. The book examines what Keen sees as the dark side of information democratization.

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

The Genographic Project: $99 to learn where you came from

“With a simple and painless cheek swab you can sample your own DNA and submit it to the lab…Your results will reveal your deep ancestry along a single line of direct descent (paternal or maternal) and show the migration paths they followed thousands of years ago. Your results will also place you on a particular branch of the human family tree.”

Feng Shui in Retail Stores

“There are four types of buildings; those that are good for people, those that are good for money, those that are good for people and money, and those that are not favorable for either. When selecting a location, a Feng Shui practitioner will examine the surrounding environment and then utilizing a Chinese Lo P’an and age old calculations will determine the nature of the building and whether the occupants should move in. Ideally, you want a building that is favorable to both people and money. In the case where it is only good for one, you can enhance the other using either the Earth element or the Water element properly placed.”

Behind the curtains of Wufoo, Blinksale, FeedBurner, and RegOnline

“Support is more demanding than most would anticipate. While multiple things can lead to support requests (poor code, bad interface, complexity, lack of documentation, etc.) what seems to matter the most to customers is how quickly, friendly, and accurately you handle it.”

Q&A with the CEO of Lego

“Monocle Editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé talks to Lego CEO, Jrgen Vig Knudstorp, at the company’s innovation centre in Billund, Denmark.”

Managing Humans

“This book isn’t just about management, it’s about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff. It’s about what to do during the first ninety days of your new gig, and explains why you should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.”

Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Mark I.	AT&T & Apple announce iPhone service plans: http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/apple/28807/
Jason F.	Oh cool, checking
Mark I.
Jason F.	I love that there are just 3 plans
Mark I.	I love that there’s unlimited data access.
Mark I.	The cell providers usually charge through the nose for it..
Jason F.	of course people will look at the minutes and price and just compare those to other plans
Jason F.	And when you do that it looks expensive
Jason F.	But with unlimited data… It’s a fair deal.
Jason F.	And AT&T has rollover too, which is great
Mark I.	These plans are totally driven by Apple, it’s obviousl
Mark I.	They make too much sense to have originated at a telco. :)

The iPhone keyboard video shows how the spacebar is replaced by web-centric options when you’re entering a URL.

URLs can’t contain blank spaces so the iPhone gets rid of the useless key and replace it with ones that add value. Great example of context over consistency.

Last night we pushed a new feature for Highrise called the List view. The List view is a condensed view of the Dashboard, people pages, company pages, and cases. It looks like this:

For this design decisions post, I want to focus on one small detail that we believe makes a big difference.

Below the each note or email you’ll see “Posted by…” or “Sent by…” attribution lines. Originally we had that text in a dark grey (#666):

We didn’t think it was easy enough to spot the name so we tried a lighter grey (#999):

Now it’s too light. We tried a variety of colors and shades of grey, but they were either too close to black, too close to white, or they stood out too much.

Then I went back to a technique I used to use way back in the days of designing UIs for FileMaker Pro databases: Use a light golden color. Internally we call this an “uncolor.” It’s barely a color, but it’s not a shade of grey. Here’s what it looks like:

The light gold stands out just enough without standing out too much. It’s a color that’s not colorful. It’s subtle, but we believe it does the job well.

This “Posted by…” information isn’t as important as the primary content so it doesn’t need to pop, but it should be easy to spot if you’re curious. By focusing on a tonal value other than grey, you can quickly pick out these attribution lines from among the black text. It provides another layer of detail without clutter or camouflage.

We hope you like the little details as much as we do.

A couple of Lil’ 37signals fave authors while growing up…

Crockett Johnson:

The Wii is beating the PS3 and Xbox 360 to pulps in the market place. In May, they sold 338K units — more than Sony (82K) and MS (155K) could manage together. In Japan it’s even more dominating, selling 5:1 against the PS3.

And while both of the super-advanced consoles from competitors are losing money for each unit handed over the counter, Nintendo is making a killing. As a result, the company’s market cap has peaked higher than Sony.

What a wonderful payoff for daring to be different with a simpler console that could be made at a profit from the get-go and can appeal to regular people who just want to have fun.