If you use Apple’s Mail.app, check out this tip. It really works. It’s like night and day for me.

Computerworld’s list includes Advanced CPU architectures, Hosted hardware, Ultra-Wideband, NAND drives, and Ruby on Rails. I don’t know if the list is in order, but Rails is listed as #1.

Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications… Released in 2004, RoR is an open-source project that originally served as the foundation of a project management tool designed by Web development company 37signals LLC. It is easily ported among Linux, Windows and Macintosh environments, and it can have a dramatic impact on the speed at which a Web development team is able to build and maintain enterprise Web sites and applications.

They also go on to list a few notable apps based on Rails and note that Rails will be shipped with OS X 10.5 Leopard.

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

The Chatters
Jacob DeHart (skinnyCorp/Threadless)
Jeffrey Kalmikoff (skinnyCorp/Threadless)
Zach Klein (Connected Ventures/Vimeo)
Jakob Lodwick (Connected Ventures/Vimeo)
Moderated by Matt from 37signals

Continued from Part 1.

Alphabet 26 combines the “best” upper and lowercase letters into an alphabet using only 26 symbols.

The impetus for Alphabet 26 was provided in 1949 as he watched his young son labor over his first reader. As he watched, he made a discovery. His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”. Obviously the boy was confused because the symbol R in the first sentence became a totally different symbol ‘r’ for the same sound in the second sentence. Results: Learning to read is that much more difficult. The act of reading is that much slower…A graphic symbol, or for that matter any trademark worth its salt, to be efficient, should be constant.”

So far we’ve talked about the big picture, permissions and groups, and the welcome and workspace tabs. Next we’re going to talk about adding people to Highrise.

Adding people manually
Speed is king. We’ve taken speed into consideration every step of the way in Highrise. And there’s more to speed than just page load. Speed also involves thinking about what information you ask for and when you ask for it. It goes beyond just required and optional fields. It’s about presentation.

The add a person page just asks for a few key data points. First name, last name, title, and company (and only first name is required). You can add contact information (phone, email, IM, address, etc.) now or later. You can also set permissions now or later.

Adding people with vCards
Adding people manually is great for one-offs or someone you just met or a lead that just called on the phone. But sometimes you already have people’s contact information elsewhere. Sometimes you have a lot of people to get into Highrise quickly. Enter vCards.

With Highrise you can upload a vCard to create people or augment an existing person quickly. Highrise can also accept a single vCard with multiple people. For example, the Apple Address Book allows you to export all your contacts into a single vCard. Highrise can read that card and import all those people at once.

Last week we pushed a major change to the Campfire transcript browser. The change was made for a variety of reasons – some of which I’ll detail below – but mostly in response to the flaws in our original “wouldn’t it be cool if…” design. We confused enthusiasm with priority.

Here’s what the transcript browser looked like before last week’s change.

I’ll take you through the original idea behind the design and then the reality of experience with a year under our belts.

1. We thought it would be great if you could click a room name to filter the transcripts by room so we built that functionality into the first column. Reality: Most people just use one or two rooms for everything. We kept filtering in the new design, but we de-emphasized it since it’s not that important.

2. We thought it would be really useful to be able to not only filter by room, but also filter by person. Just show me the chats that Jamis Buck was involved with. Reality: Theoretically useful, but rarely used. The overhead to build this list and deal with per-person filtering was not worth the cost – not by a longshot.

3. We thought that listing every single day since you signed up would be a useful way to get at past transcripts. Reality: The most common scenario is wanting to jump back to a recent chat that happened sometime in the past few weeks. Remembering which day something happened from 8 months ago is less likely than just searching for some keywords.

4. We thought a single narrow column to display transcripts, people in those chats, and files uploaded on those days would be enough space. Reality: A single active room could take up 10” of vertical space or more. A tall, narrow column is not the ideal layout for browsing through past chats.

5. We thought the old transcript browser would be fast. Reality: The old transcript browser was embarrassingly slow. The design demanded it pull too much complex data too often. It was fine for your first two weeks of using Campfire, but the slowdown was exponential the more you used it. Not good.

We realized that the transcripts were the most important things on the screen – not the navigation to get to them. Just give me the transcripts!

So we redesigned it keeping “it’s the transcripts, stupid” in mind.

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

The Chatters
Jacob DeHart (skinnyCorp/Threadless)
Jeffrey Kalmikoff (skinnyCorp/Threadless)
Zach Klein (Connected Ventures/Vimeo)
Jakob Lodwick (Connected Ventures/Vimeo)
(Moderated by Matt from 37signals)

Topics
Our chatters — old friends btw — discuss Threadless, Vimeo, retail stores, video, community, Silicon Valley, YouTube, Yahoo, and a lot more.

From 0 to 60 to World Domination is a lengthy article discussing how Toyota’s success is the result of its unorthodox philosophies about engineering and business. Some excerpts below.

Irei projects are one that will be accomplished no matter what it takes…

Within Toyota, there is a rare and secretive designation for certain development projects known as irei, which is roughly translated as “not ordinary” or “exceptional” and refers to vehicles that the company will spend any amount on and go to almost any lengths to engineer, market and perfect.

Chief engineers go on lengthy expeditions to test designs…

Under its system, an engineer appointed to lead a new project has a huge budget and near absolute authority over the project. Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or a redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves — the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu — what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short. This quest can sometimes seem Arthurian, with chief engineers leading lonely and gallant expeditions in an attempt to figure out how to beat the competition. Most extreme, perhaps, was the task Yuji Yokoya set for himself when he was asked to redesign the Sienna minivan. He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans — on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets — and make Toyota’s superior. Curiously, even when his three-year, 53,000-mile journey was finished, Yokoya could not stop. One person at Toyota told me he bumped into him at a hotel in the middle of Death Valley, Calif., after the new Sienna came out in 2004. Apparently, Yokoya wanted to see how his redesigned van was handling in the desert.

Parts are made just in time via on-site parts suppliers…

There is no real inventory of parts, which is a hallmark of Toyota’s approach. Once a truck chassis begins its run on the factory line, an order goes out to, say, an on-site parts supplier that provides seats for the interior. At Avanzar, an independent company located in a large workroom adjacent to the assembly line, I watched workers build a car seat from scratch. They chose a raw steel frame with springs, put it on their own minifactory assembly line to add padding, then leather, and then they transferred it (via pulley, over a partition wall) to the Tundra assembly line, where it was installed in the truck. If the front seat had not been ordered 85 minutes earlier, it would not exist.