Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine has a new issue out on Project Management and p. 20-29 offer an in-depth introduction to using Basecamp. Another way to learn about Basecamp: Webucator offers a training class.

A neat tip: You can use the new Basecamp Mobile UI as a Fluid menu bar app on your computer. That way you can get a quick view of your Basecamp projects straight from your menu bar. Instructions.

Basecamp Mobile isn’t the only option for using Basecamp on your phone. Ascent is a Windows Phone 7 mobile client for Basecamp. Kompass, a Basecamp portal for smartphones, is now in free public beta. Summit, a third-party iPhone app for Basecamp, got an update (plus it’s half off for a limited time). QuickFire lets you easily add To-Dos into Basecamp from your iPhone.

Other Basecamp Extra news: Get access to your messages and to-dos inside Raven. Are My Sites Up White Label, a website monitoring service, now syncs with Basecamp and Highrise. And Geckoboard delivers a real-time status board for your business that integrates with Basecamp.

Highrise
Lots of Highrise Extras to report on too: Tout lets you templatize repetitive emails so you can avoid endless copying-and-pasting and integrates with Highrise so the people you pitch to are automatically added to your contacts. Ideaffect.com is “suggestion box” software that integrates with Highrise. Zopim Live Chat integrates with Highrise too. So does Bidsketch, proposal software for designers. And WeMakeProjects Gmail gadget does too.

Case studies
In one year, ProductiveMuslim.com grew exponentially, managing a global team of volunteers covering Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada and UK and over 20,000 fans worldwide with the help of 37signals products. Top Test Prep boosts conversion rates with Highrise and tracks progress with Basecamp. And DTS International says, “The 37signals Suite takes the useless shit and clutter out of productivity solutions.”

Backpack
Pouch is a third-party iPhone/iPad app for Backpack. Packrat, an offline Backpack client, got a major upgrade.

Campfire
This fun video from Zach Holman on Automating Inefficiencies shows some neat ways to waste time get creative in Campfire:

I decided to do one on some of the tools I use most in my day-to-day interactions with the rest of GitHub: Campfire, my dotfiles, and boom. By combining all of these together, we can successfully make your company’s chat room super inefficient. Apply some programming and boom, you’re suddenly automating inefficiencies.

Miscellaneous
We’ll be retiring our support of OpenID on May 1. What we’ve learned over the past three years is that it didn’t actually make anything any simpler for the vast majority of our customers. Today we have 37signals ID that provides the same functionality with none of the headaches.

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I’ve been at 37signals for a couple of months now, and I thought I’d introduce myself and share the answers to a few questions I’ve been asked. I’m our “business analyst”, “data guy” or “stats guy”, but those all leave some explanation lacking of who I am and what I do.

Who are you?

I’m a mechanical engineer by training, but I spent the last couple of years working at McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm. I did a range of different things, but spent most of my time focusing on understanding and predicting individuals’ behavior as it relates to the healthcare system – how people use physicians, hospitals, and their health insurance policy. I live and work just outside of Pittsburgh, PA.

What would you say you do here?

I tend to think that there are three things that I’m trying to do.

1. Look at data to try to improve our products- understanding how people interact with and use our products helps us make better decisions about how to improve them. Sometimes this is about new features; other times, it’s about the smaller details – where does a pagination break make sense based on how many projects people have?

   
   We’re planning to share some specific examples of how we’re using data to inform design decisions over the next few months.

2. Use data to help grow – Too much of using data to “help businesses grow” is about predicting (guessing) revenue or profit in five years. This is kind of fun intellectually (and there are cleverly named tools like “Crystal Ball” to do this), but it’s less useful than finding real things that we can do today or in the near future that will meaningfully impact the business. This means focusing on why people cancel, how they interact with signup pages, etc.


3. Answer those “I wonder” questions- one of my favorite parts of working at 37signals is watching products develop every day in Campfire and on Basecamp. While doing that, people occasionally start a sentence with “I wonder…”. I get to move from wondering to knowing, and that’s loads of fun to do.

How do you do what you do?

There’s nothing magical here – most of the challenge is just about knowing the right questions to ask and understanding the relationships between data. The actual tools matter a lot less.

We have a few reporting tools that we’ve built, and use a few commercial tools (Google Analytics, Clicky), but most analysis gets done from raw data. I do virtually all of my work within a statistical programming language called R (with a couple of custom functions to interface to our databases and APIs for Clicky, etc.) and with simple unix tools like awk/sed. This combination is incredibly simple, powerful, and adaptable, and R has a great community behind it. I use a couple of different tools to produce graphics (mostly ggplot2 in R and OmniGraphSketcher), and I’m experimenting with narrated screencasts, etc. to share results as well. Of course, my trusty HP-12C never leaves my desk.

Have any other questions? I’ll try to answer any below or in a future post or podcast.

Sketchnotes of Ryan’s talk at WebExpo Prague 2010 from the book “Sketchnotes 2009 & 2010” by Eva-Lotta Lamm. It features 101 pages of notes from UX and design events. The full set is also available at Flickr.

Here’s what happened in Campfire when I found out Noah, our stats guy, uses a calculator that came out in 1981:

Related: Reverse Polish notation [Wikipedia]

It’s been about 24 hours since we launched Basecamp Mobile. We wanted to share the platform/device stats so far.

iOS is dominating with 84%. Android is coming in around 15%. Blackberry and webOS combine for about 1%.

We’re using Clicky to generate these stats.

It will be interesting to see how these change over time (we’ll post them every few months or whatever ultimately seems interesting).

The new Charles S. Anderson Design Co. site is near perfect*.

It’s a beautifully simple and clear departure from the overtly complicated designs that you’ll often find when you browse design firms, architecture firms, and, most notably, photographers’ sites.

The new CSA site confidently says: We know what we’re doing. When you’re this good you don’t have to show off.

No hovers, no lightboxes, no scrolling images, no flash, no unnecessary clicks, nothing fancy at all. It’s presented clearly, directly, and without stuffy ceremony. The latest fad, technique, or technology is nowhere to be found. They’re comfortable in their own skin and it shows.

It’s effortless. I just love it.

Click on a project and you get a straightforward page with the work down the middle and the details in the margin. Each project has its own URL and is easily sharable and printable. CSA’s address and phone number is on every page. Just plain smart.

The copywriting is clear and it has purpose. It’s not too serious, too clever, or too cute. It’s plain english, yet colorful where it matters. It wants to be read. This kind of writing respects the reader.

Whenever someone asks me for an example of a site designed by someone who understands the fundamental strengths of the web, I will point to CSA’s site. This is the example.

* I’d bump up the font size a bit.

Today we launch Basecamp Classic Mobile for phones and devices with WebKit browsers. This includes the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, Motorola Droid X, Motorola Droid 2, Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Incredible, HTC Evo, Palm Pre 2, BlackBerry Torch, or any other device running iOS 4+, Android 2.1+, webOS 2, or BlackBerry 6.

Basecamp Classic Mobile is not an native app, it’s a web app. All you have to do is visit http://basecamphq.com on your mobile phone. No apps and nothing to install – it just works.

A mobile version of Basecamp Classic has been a top customer request for some time now. We’re thrilled to finally be able to deliver. We put a ton of work into it. We hope you love it as much as we do.

Why a web app and not a native app?

Back in July we put up a job ad for an iOS developer. We had decided to dive into native apps for the iPhone. We contracted out the back-end development of our iPhone app for Highrise. The project went well, but we felt like we had to have someone in-house to continue the development of the Highrise app and future apps we wanted to build.

And then Android really began to make a run. Android market share increased and more and more customers were asking for Android apps for our web apps. So we stopped and thought about it for a bit. Do we want to have to hire an iOS developer and an Android developer? That’s a lot of specialization, and we’re usually anti-specialization when it comes to development.

Eventually we came to the conclusion that we should stick with what we’re good at: web apps. We know the technologies well, we have a great development environment and workflow, we can control the release cycle, and everyone at 37signals can do the work. It’s what we already do, just on a smaller screen. We all loved our smaller screens so we were eager to dive in. Plus, since WebKit-based browsers were making their way to the webOS and Blackberry platforms too, our single web-app would eventually run on just about every popular smartphone platform.

Comfortable and confident in our decision, we set out to build the best possible mobile web app for our Basecamp Classic customers.

This is version 1.0

A big part of this initial release was nailing the basics that mattered the most. We had to make a bunch of hard calls about what was important enough to make version 1. That meant leaving some things out and not bringing full functionality to other things. For example, you can view Milestones but you can’t add new ones. But you can view, add, change, and assign to-dos. We plan on rounding out the functionality as time goes on.

More to share soon

We have a lot of material and lessons to share regarding the design and development of Basecamp Classic Mobile. Technical decisions, design decisions, explorations, stuff on the cutting room floor. Lots to share. Stay tuned.

Credit

Basecamp Classic Mobile is here today because of the hard work and extraordinary creativity of Jason Zimdars, Sam Stephenson, and Josh Peek. These guys worked their asses off on this project. They made it happen. We couldn’t be happier with the results.

Thanks to our customers

To all our customers: Thanks for being patient while we developed Basecamp Classic Mobile. It took a while, but we wanted to get it right. We now have a completely modern, fantastic foundation upon which we can continue to make the mobile experience better and better. Plus, we’ll be able to reuse some of the new technology in the desktop versions of our web apps. We’re already working on something big right now that’s only possible because of our work on mobile.

We leave you with a fun little video starring some of the hands of 37signals:

Music by Sudara. Listen to more from him and other independent artists in Issue #02 of Ramen Music, the online music magazine he curates.

We have some new chalkboard art in the office. My old pal Nate Otto came by and spent a day having fun with some chalk and one of our walls.

We’re looking forward to having Nate back for some more fun another time. Check out more of Nate’s work.