Steve Jobs made a very interesting announcement today at the WWDC Keynote. Wanna write for apps for the iPhone? Make them web apps that work on Safari. Done.

That is a bold idea. Very forward thinking. A whole new product with the opportunity for a whole new platform. But instead Apple chooses simple and familiar: HTML and Javascript. Tens of millions of developers already know it. Instant developer uptake and an instant batch of apps that likely already work with the iPhone.

This is the coming out party for web apps. We are very excited about this. These are exciting times.

And one more thing… Something else that makes us smile is a paragraph on this page at the Apple Site:

Mac OS X is now the ideal platform for all kinds of script-based development. Ruby 1.8.6 and Python 2.5 are both first-class languages for Mac development, thanks to Cocoa bridges, Xcode and Interface Builder support, DTrace monitoring, and Framework builds — plus AppleEvent bindings via the new Scripting Bridge. Leopard is also the premier platform for Ruby on Rails development, thanks to Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano bundling.

Hells yeah.

Some recent postings at the 37signals Job Board:

Northwestern University is looking for a Sr. Web Applications/Software Developer in Evanston, IL.

LevelTen Design is looking for a Web Developer in Cleveland, OH.

imeem, inc. is looking for a Visual/Interaction Designer in San Francisco, CA.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is looking for a Web Innovator in New York, NY.

SpikeSource is looking for a UI Designer in Redwood City, CA.

Link to Life Connect Ltd is looking for a Technical Architect in Nantgarw, Cardiff.

Waterfall Mobile is looking for a Software Engineer in San Francisco.

Skype is looking for a Product Designer in London.

Epoch.com is looking for a Senior Web Developer in Santa Monica, CA.

Comcast is looking for a Web Developer in Philadelphia, PA.

Joost is looking for a Web Designer in New York, NY.

Library of Congress is looking for an Information Technology Specialist in Washington, DC.

Inkling is looking for a Senior Rails Developer in Chicago, IL.

Avenue A Razorfish is looking for a User Experience Lead in Austin, TX.

AOL is looking for a Tech Analyst in Dulles, VA.

Find a job or put your design/programming job in front of the best at the Job Board. Freelancers/contractors can meet their match at the Gig Board.

(Continued from Part 1.)

Matt	How do you approach client work differently than your personal projects?
Jonathan	I’ve been fortunate to have had some really amazing clients—Yahoo! (for the time capsule), Seed Magazine (for Phylotaxis), and Daylife. The nature of those projects matches very closely the type of work I would be making anyway, so it has been a very natural process.
Aaron	I’ve been extremely lucky recently and have been able to work on a number of projects guided very much by my own interests. Coincedentally, I also have been working with Yahoo! ... in a totally different group as a resident designer, as well as working with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and MIT’s One Laptop Per Child project
Marcos	I had been playing around with the idea of doing something with google news and then I came through Ben Shneidermann’s research paper on treemaps and then I think it was very clear what I needed to do.
Aaron	At Yahoo! I’ve been working in a new team called "Design Innovation" focused on prototypes and ideation internally. It’s been great. Most of what we’re doing here is internal investigation, but I can show a few examples that we’ve been playing with.
Aaron
Aaron	This screenshot is from an animatied visualization system for looking at traffic accidents in urban areas
Matt	neat
Jonathan
Jonathan	Mine is Phylotaxis, an ever-changing zeitgeist of science news images. The identity of Seed Magazine actually changes every few hours, as the world of science news changes.

Michael Bierut’s “Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos” is an especially fun read on The Morning After the end of the Sopranos.

Even more entertaining are the reviews encouraging you to cancel your HBO subscription. More reviews here. And here.

It’s funny to hear people bitch about the end. There are lots of people saying it was lazy and lacked creativity, but in the same breath they fire off all the possible endings they envisioned.

Isn’t a large part of creativity about the unexpected? If it was predicable it wasn’t creative. If it was formulaic it wasn’t creative. if it was obvious is wasn’t creative.

I think last night’s show was one of the most creative finales I’ve ever seen. The show may be over, but it didn’t end. Or did it? That’s creative.

If you dig Basecamp we’d love if you’ve vote for Basecamp in the Webware 100. Thanks for your support!

An edge on every brownie. Now that’s creative. Great design.

Most copywriting on the web sucks because it’s written for the writer, not for the reader. Write for the reader. That is all.

Tiny code is always best

“The fundamental nature of coding is that our task, as programmers, is to recognize that every decision we make is a trade-off. To be a master programmer is to understand the nature of these trade-offs, and be conscious of them in everything we write…START WITH BREVITY. Increase the other dimensions AS REQUIRED BY TESTING.”

Top ten reasons why web 2.0 sucks

“M&A Wack-a-mole stopping innovation in its tracks…Most of Web 2.0 is going to wind up becoming the corporate walking dead of long forgotten or poorly understood acquisitions. Consumers suffer when entrepreneurs won’t make a go of it on their own and make a bigger impact on their online experience.”

Flickr fails “The Mom Test”

“I told Mom to peruse the pictures and click Order Prints for each one she wanted on paper. Unfortunately, Flickr was the wrong tool for that job. The terminology is confusing — quick, what’s the difference between a Photo Group, a Photo Set and a Photo Stream? Worse, it takes seven mouse clicks, two pop-up menus and two dialog boxes to order one print of one photo. My mom wound up spending hours on what should have been a 10-minute job.”

Fellini on freedom

“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.” -Federico Fellini

Turn off ads for repeat visitors?

“It didn’t matter how big or small the site was, how narrow focused or completely open-ended the content was. The biggest single group of visitors to these sites were people who had never seen them before and would never return again. Among my informal polling of friends and my own sites, the lowest percentage of one-time visitors was 53%. Some sites had as much as 75% of their traffic come from people that had only visited once.”

A note on heart by Hillman Curtis:

I once gave a talk called “Putting Your Heart into Design” at a design school in Connecticut, and one of the students asked me what advice I had for people who, just starting out, will no doubt be doing the same things all the time, just churning out banner ads — or like me, when I started at Macromedia years ago, building executive presentations over and over. “How do you put your heart into that?” he asked.

I told him about my first year at Macromedia, about the corporate presentations that consisted mainly of bullet points, pie graphs, and dull charts. I told him that I decided to focus on the exactitude of each design, and made each pixel as perfect as I could. I got deep into exploring the Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann and grids. I focused on typography and consistency in design. And through all of the repetition I became aware of the power of restraint and simplicity. On the few occasions that I incorporated motion, I was always very conservative and moved elements in ways that reflected the theme of the presentation. They were not simply gratuitous.

I came to believe that even though a viewer might not be able to point to the screen and indicate exactly where an element had move two pixels from page to page in a presentation or Web site, he or she could sense it, and too many of those mistakes could leave the viewer with a feeling of imbalance. I explained all of this to the student. When I was finished he replied, “So, rather than just taking on jobs you can put your heart into, you should find a way to put your heart into everything you do.” Which was a wonderful way to put it.

From Curtis’ book Creating Short Films for the Web.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Basecamp Customer Video: NYSE TransactTools
TransactTools is the commercial technology arm of the New York Stock Exchange.

NYSE TransactTools video.

Previewing the revised Basecamp Dashboard
We’re always looking for ways to improve the organization of the information presented on this information-heavy screen.

Store your account/login info at Highrise
“Highrise is great for aggregating information about all the accounts I have for various web applications.”