When collaborating with others – especially when designers and programmers are part of the mix – watch out for these dirty four letter words:

• Need
• Must
• Can’t
• Easy
• Just
• Only
• Fast

They are especially dangerous when you string them together. How many times have you said or heard something like this:
“We really need it. If we don’t we can’t make the customer happy. Wouldn’t it be easy if we just did it like that? Can you try it real fast?”
Of course they aren’t always bad. Sometimes they can do some good. But seeing them too often should raise a red flag. They can really get you into trouble.
Related: Revealing hidden assumptions in estimation by Jamis Buck.

Recent posts at the newly launched 37signals Product Blog:

Instrument and Wieden+Kennedy use Basecamp to launch new WK site

Instrument and global ad agency Wieden+Kennedy recently used Basecamp to collaborate on W+K’s new site.

10‭ ‬Ways to Be Productive with Backpack

Web Worker Daily just published 10 ways to be productive with Backpack.

Twitter, Campfire, and the power of persistent real-time chat amoung groups

The reason Twitter works is very similar to the reason Campfire works: Power is unleashed when you bring a simple UI to persistent real-time chat among groups.

Using Highrise to maintain meaningful relationships

Youth worker Josh Cook has a bunch of tips that are good idea starters for anyone who uses Highrise.

Add tasks quickly to Highrise via Quicksilver

Fitzage.com offers Quicksilver addicts two scripts that integrate with Highrise.

Backpack one of PC World’s 100 Best Products of 2007

PC World lists the 100 Best Products of 2007 and Backpack comes in at #66. We’re thrilled to be included.

bcToolkit generates time and project reports for Basecamp

KMP Interactive Marketing & Technology built bcToolkit, a tool to generate reports using the Basecamp API.

If you’re into Frank Lloyd Wright and the old-timey direct interview style of Mike Wallace, this two-part interview (that’s an iTunes link) may interest you. I found it fascinating.

In 1957, at the age of 90, Frank Lloyd Wright was in New York to supervise construction of his final masterpiece—the Guggenheim Museum. Mike Wallace invited him to be a guest on the TV show, The Mike Wallace Interview. Rarely has a figure of such historic importance been so revealingly captured. Guided by Wallace’s questioning, America’s greatest architect emerges as a wise, idealistic, nonconformist, and uniquely self-confident man. This is the complete soundtrack to that legendary interview.

If you have RealPlayer installed you can watch some clips from the interview on PBS.org. The entire interview is available on VHS from Amazon.

Also highly recommended is the two-and-a-half hour Ken Burns documentary on Wright.

Wilco
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on the internet:

Internet is radio for a lot of people. It’s a place to get music and hear music, and no amount of clamping down will change that. And anybody who’d expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It’s so antithetical to being a musician.

On not trying to make everybody happy:

My question is: Could anybody imagine the Wilco record that would make everybody happy? I can’t imagine it. So you’re confronted with that reality—anything you do is going to be a disappointment to somebody. We just have to do what we do, and that’s make a record that we fuckin’ like. [Laughs.] We really don’t have any other options.

Lyrics from “What Light” by Wilco:

And if the whole world’s singing your songs
And all of your paintings have been hung
Just remember what was yours is everyone’s from now on
And that’s not wrong or right
But you can struggle with it all you like
You'll only get uptight

The White Stripes
The White Stripes are now on Warner Brothers and Jack White recently recorded a Coke commercial. White on indie cred:

Maybe we were stupid with this naive thing about if artistic freedom and business collide, something bad happens.

And here’s White on embracing limitations:

The idea of wearing just these colors, having just the two of us on stage—these are just boxes that we’ve cooked up to put ourselves in so that we can create better. If we had five people on the stage, all the opportunity of a 300-track studio, or a brand-new Les Paul, the creativity would be dead. Too much opportunity would make it too easy. We just don’t want to be complicated, it seems unnecessary.

Lyrics from “Little Room” by the White Stripes.

When you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it is really good
You're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started sittin' in your little room

With the recent Basecamp UI refresh, we changed the comment line on the bottom of each message shown when viewing the “Messages” tab.

The old message view.

The new message view.

The new design reduces the difference between the “Posted by…” line and the actual message. It now has the same size, color, and spacing as the body of the message (the headline size and spacing falls in line now too).

The old way added unnecessary style and color changes, creating unwanted noise at the end of every message. The new way provides a solid rhythm so it’s easy to keep the visual beat while you scan.

To get the full effect, view a real-size before & after comparison.

James Surowiecki on why feature creep is so hard to stop

“Although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity.”

Panel of CEOs and experts pick the best business books of all time

“The responses ranged far and wide: Military metaphors popped up occasionally, with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War rearing its age-old head. But books about biology were also surprisingly prevalent, not only for their insight into how business environments imitate the natural world but also, several executives said, because understanding biology helped them appreciate the concept of randomness.”

How does Bill Gates feel about about the John Hodgman character in those Mac ads?

Gates: “Yeah, I’m not gonna comment on someone else’s ad.” Garfield: “OK, well, Bill Gates, thank you so much for joining us.” Gates: (Silence)

The value of sketching

“Sketches, he argues, are quick, inexpensive, disposable, plentiful, offer minimal detail, and suggest and explore rather than confirm. (It should be noted that he doesn’t limit “sketches” to pen on paper—a sketch might be digital or three-dimensional.) The value of sketching is less in the artifacts themselves than in the cognitive process of working through dozens of ideas, of considering as many options as possible, and allowing each option to raise new questions…Sketching is less expensive than prototyping, and far less expensive than trying to fix problems late in the development cycle.”

Ajax violating expectations?

“The availability of Ajax technology is causing some developers to diverge from the native look and feel of the web in favor of a user interface style I call ‘desktop app in a web browser’...When you build a ‘desktop in the web browser’-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption. The fact that you can create web applications that resemble desktop applications does not imply that you should; it only means that you have one more option and subsequent set of trade-offs to consider when making design decisions.” [via OR]

Ask the Wizard

Great blog by FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo. Includes very detailed posts about running a biz, funding, etc.

What the Agile Manifesto left out

“If you snoop around my house, you’ll notice that there’s a silverware drawer that’s rather tidy and a junk drawer that’s not. It’s much easier to find a spoon than a battery. There’s a reason for that: my family and I look for spoons several times a day, but for batteries much less often. Things you use often should be easy to find. Things you do often should be easy to do. Properties like this, which Gabriel collectively calls “habitability,” can go against software principles.”

The May 28th subscriber’s edition of Time (Al Gore is on the cover) includes a piece on 37signals called Small Is Essential by Jeremy Caplan.

It includes a 3/4 page shot of the whole team. It’s rare we’re all together in the same place so it’s pretty cool to have it on film.

The article focuses primarily on how we’re structured, what we’re focused on, and how we place high value on small and simple.

Special thanks to Jeremy for writing the article and to Chris Strong and his crew for the working around our schedule to slip the photo shoot in. Much appreciated.

Note: This article only appears in the subscriber edition of the magazine. The newsstand edition does not have this article.

Clickbank
Brian Armstrong: “Clever wording on the first field of this signup form from clickbank.com. I bet it substantially reduces people’s subconscious aversion to filling out forms.”

Commerce Bank
Daniel Drucker on Commerce Bank: “Most useless icons EVER.”

We recently went out and filmed some of our customers talking about why they love Basecamp and the positive impact it’s had on their businesses. It was really great to meet these fans in person and hear their eloquent descriptions of how Basecamp helps them get projects done.

The first group of video profiles:

• R.BIRD, a consulting firm with 25 years of experience in packaging design and branding.
• Atelier Weddings, planners of top-notch weddings in NYC.
• Elsewares, an online catalog of unique products from independent designers, artists, and entrepreneurs.
• TransactTools, the commercial technology arm of the New York Stock Exchange.

[On Writing posts offer up interesting copy from around the web.]

SORBS Dynamic User and Host List
SORBS is the “Spam and Open Relay Blocking System.” Boo to the site’s perplexing explanation of how to get deleted from the Dynamic User and Host List:

Anyone else may request delisting of addresses or netblocks provided that reverse DNS naming is set to indicate static assignment. SORBS will consider unique names that are not part of a generic naming scheme, or a generic naming scheme with an indication of staticness (we prefer the word “static” being included in the names, but will accept any existing ISP convention if the ISP just informs us of it) as proof of static assignment. Also, the Times to Live of the PTR records need to be 43200 seconds or more. This is an arbitrary limit chosen by SORBS. And of course, the reverse DNS names need to be valid; i.e. the names given in reverse DNS need to map forward to the IP addresses for which they were given.

Wondermill
User Experience Design Ninja job description:

When people have created an account with one of our products, they should shed a tear because the experience is over.  They should write ballads and march from town to town reading them to anyone who’ll listen.  They should hang signs from highway overpasses proclaiming our good name, hold 3-day block parties and call up radio stations to dedicate cheesy songs.

They should obsess.

Banzai De Bug
Banzai De Bug Pest Control shows that even unsavory industries can come up with an interesting story:

The pest control industry is changing. Most people picture a pest control operator as a guy walking around with a tank spraying chemicals. George started out with a sprayer but for the past 5 to 6 years has been using glue boards and baiting techniques.

George goes to work every day dressed in a blazer and gets to his clients on his motorcycle. He got into this business at the age of 43 and loves it. He feels this job is great for his personality and feels he needs to be his own boss.

George’s specialty is treating for rats and mice. He describes his job as that of a detective. “A big piece of this job is getting the details and facts, figuring out how it can happen and then solving the problem. The real satisfaction comes when I go back to the job to see that it worked.” His approach to catching the rodents is to give them a well balanced meal, served up on a glue board. He takes a piece of cardboard and spreads glue all over it. Then he takes bits of meat, sardines, and a Hershey Bar with almonds for dessert. The beverage of choice to serve with this feast is beer. George knows that the rats will drink until they can’t drink anymore and eventually they will become sick, choke and die. This is all done without pesticides.

George feels that if you are honest and good you get better at what you do and you will do well. He created his business; no one gave it to him.