We’ve just launched the new 37signals product blog at productblog.37signals.com (subscribe to the RSS feed). Here you’ll find everything you want to know about our products:

• Tips and tricks
• Feature updates
• Extras, widgets, API integrations, etc.
• Case studies
• Press clips
• Coupons
• And more…

We created this new blog because we want customers to have one place to check for news and information regarding all 37signals products.

We’ll still post occasional product news here at Signal vs. Noise like we always have, but the new product blog is the place to get the in-depth scoop on Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-Da List, and Writeboard.

We’ll be tweaking some details and design elements over the next few weeks, but we wanted to get it out there now since 95% of the value exists already.

(Note: The launch of this universal 37signals product blog means the end of the line for Everything Basecamp and Everything Backpack. the individual blogs we had for those products.)

If there’s anything you’d like to see there, if you’ve got a tip that other customers might enjoy, or if you think you’d make for an interesting case study, let us know. We’re really looking to build up the site with good, customer-driven content so don’t be bashful.

Also, we’ll be adding a Getting Real section to the site shortly and we’re on the lookout for success stories. If you’ve found Getting Real helpful, tell us about it.

Mint
Daniel Weiner: “The Mint forum lets you view a page of 30 posts that haven’t been replied to yet. It’s a great way to help other people without having to go through pages of posts that have already been answered.”

MySpace
Tony Cosentini: “If you want to narrow down your search results on MySpace by zip code, you have to specify how close the results should be. The default distance is set to any which doesn’t change your search results at all and causes you to waste time having to by forcing you to click on the drop down.”

In Momofuku Ko, The Full Reveal [via JK], hot NYC chef David Chang discusses changes in his restaurant empire and how his restaurants are a “spiritual home.” Although it’s foodie talk, a lot of the issues apply to all kinds of businesses, including those in the web sphere.

He talks about learning from mistakes (and how that gets harder to do once people are watching you)...

If we have learned anything, it’s that we’re terrible at opening restaurants and really good at making mistakes. We’re okay with that – learning from our mistakes has helped us grow as cooks and restaurant operators – but it’s harder to change and learn and grow when you’re constantly under a microscope.

Hype starts to obscure real value and distracts from the real task at hand…

Also, too much in the restaurant business is about hype right now. (I know we are lucky in that department and, trust me, we are thankful for the opportunities the attention has afforded us.) But chefs are not rock stars and are not cool. Restaurant openings are not movie premieres. All the bullshit distracts from the real task at hand – cooking – and from the food, which is what we’re in it for.

“Home” takes you to the top of the page. “End” takes you to the bottom. They’re easier and faster than scrolling all the way up or down a page. I see people scrolling to the top or the bottom an awful lot.

The more I watch people use computers the more I start to think that “Home” and “End” should be bigger, given new positions on the keyboard, or renamed “Top” and “Bottom”.

These keys are usually stacked in the middle of a six key cluster. They’re small and their function isn’t all that clear. You can just press one to see what happens, but I’ve also noticed people don’t experiment with their keyboards. They use the keys they know and avoid the rest.

None of this is a big deal of course, I just wanted to share it. I’ve been observing it a lot lately so I figured I’d toss it out there for comment.

Do nothing fast
From: Des Traynor

Thought you might like this quote from one of Microsofts very talented programmers, Raymond Chen...Speaking during Q & A at the PDC developers conference recently…

One of the questions I always get asked is, “My app is soo slow to startup! What are the super secret evil tricks you guys at Microsoft are using to get your apps to startup faster?” And the answer is … the super evil trick … is to do less stuff. Because the stuff you don’t do doesn’t slow anything down…It turns out I can do nothing really really fast!

Pinkberry yogurt = “frozen heroin juice”
From: Scott Heiferman

The taste that launched 1,000 parking tickets [“This is a story about yogurt, but it is also about entrepreneurship, financial and cultural expectations, beating the heat, beating the caloric system and parking.”]

Hwang and Lee agreed that the store should be streamlined, so there are only two flavors of yogurt—plain and green tea. You cannot buy anything else. Not even water. There is little waste and the staff can be trained in a few hours (it’s not hard to yank down on the handle of a soft-serve yogurt machine).

Vignelli explains his 1972 NYC Subway Map
From: Tyler Rooney

Massimo Vignelli explains his 1972 NYC Subway Map (Quicktime, 4 minutes).

I thought you guys might appreciate this. It’s outtake footage from the documentary ‘Helvetica’. Vignelli even mentions what he did wrong with his iconic subway map.

Dougal MacPherson sent in a photo of a menu from a recent Qantas flight he took from Melbourne to New Zealand. At the bottom of the menu, there is a “journey planner” timeline that shows passengers when they will be served meals, receive immigration documents, etc. It’s a creative way to set in-flight expectations.

Click for full version

By crazy popular demand we present the Highrise API. The Highrise API now joins the Basecamp API, Backpack API, and the unofficial Campfire API.

So what can you do with the Highrise API? You could create useful things like Dashboard/Yahoo/Vista widgets for quick contact lookups or adding notes or tasks. You could write a tool to sync Highrise with Outlook, the Mac Address book, Plaxo, or your mobile phone. You could make a Highrise Quicksilver plug-in like this Backpack Quicksilver plug-in. There are a thousand ideas out there waiting for you. Here are some of the things developers have done with the Basecamp API.

Let us know what you build and we’ll happily help you promote it to our Highrise customers. Have fun and build something useful!

“Against the Odds” is the autobiography of vacuum guru James Dyson. Jason recently mentioned it in our internal Campfire chat room: “One of the best books about design, business, invention, and entrepreneurship I’ve ever read. Highly recommended. It’s really inspirational. His persistence is otherworldly. You won’t believe what he went through to get this product to market.” Here’s one customer’s review of the book at Amazon:

I especially enjoyed the part about the early development of the machine, in which he made something like one version per day for over three years, varying things one at a time, measuring everything to exhaustion, all the while sinking further and further into debt. Edisonian it was, but sometimes that is the only way—the quest for the quick breakthrough emphasized by modern industrial managers can be a real obstacle to progress.

Ahead, a couple of interesting excerpts from articles on Dyson…

The inventor's life, he says in The Independent, is "one of failure".

When you watch a writer on a movie programme tearing up page after page, you think he’s in utter despair. And, in many ways, that’s what it’s like for us, but you learn much more in fact from an experiment which didn’t work out how you intended, but instead sheds some light on possibly another way of doing something. It can get very depressing but then suddenly, one day you make a break through, and that’s very exciting…

You can’t go out and do market research to try to solve these problems about what to do next because usually, or very often, you’re doing the opposite of what market research would tell you. You can’t base a new project two years ahead on current market trends and what users are thinking at the moment. That sounds very arrogant. But it isn’t arrogance. You can’t go and ask your customers to be your inventors. That’s your job…

The article also describes the suspended table in the company’s boardroom:

Mr Dyson thought it might “be nice” to have a table with no legs. At all. So in the company’s boardroom there is a giant glass table that is suspended from the ceiling by four cables. Another cable in the centre anchors it to the floor. And there you have the perfect example of how form fuses with function in Mr Dyson’s world.

Funky pinhole panoramic camera

Casado Pinhole is a panoramic camera reduced to its simplest elements. [tx CH]

“His paintbrush is his Macintosh”
Profile of Takagi Masakatsu, visual artist and musician. He transforms video footage into “paintings in motion.”

Moleskine popups
Moleskine popups: “Done on the run with pocket tools and available light…uses two spreads, edges glued together.” (more) [via drawn]

Highrise has always been able to import contacts from vCards or Basecamp, but now Highrise can also import your contacts from Outlook and ACT!. It feels great to check “Importing from Outlook and ACT” off the “top requests” to-do list.

Supported formats include Outlook 2003, 2007, and Outlook Express. The ACT! import works with ACT! 9.

You can import by clicking the “Import” link in the sidebar on the Contacts tab. The help section provides further guidance for importing and exporting.

We hope this helps making the move to Highrise easier!