Highlights from this week’s 37signals staff posts at Twitter.

@mattlinderman From the “if it sounds like BS, it probably is” category: Goldman Sachs’ “synthetic collateralized debt obligation” http://nyti.ms/acXgJN

@dhh I mean, really, Apple, http://is.gd/buYUb and http://is.gd/buYTR – words fail me. (via timbray)—it’s a sad time to be an Apple “fan” :(

@rjs Bit the bullet and got a network drive. The WD My Book was really easy to set up. Plug into Time Capsule. Done. http://amzn.to/baWO0O

@dhh Someone should plot the historical likelihood of failure if a company reaches Series E funding. Gut says it’s towering.

@mattlinderman Art w/ push pins instead of pixels. “Georges Seurat meets Office Depot.” Neat how viewer distance changes the impact. http://bit.ly/aBJ0JN

@jasonfried “Knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you know the something.” -Richard Feynman (paraphrased)

@mattlinderman http://bit.ly/de08xT – Consulting business? Cut back client work 50% for a while & build a product. Even if it fails, you’ll learn a ton.

@rjs A product can be so compelling that it reaches out into its context and rearranges the constraining forces and incentives.

@dhh Thanks to awesome some volunteers, we’re in the process of bringing Basecamp to Norweigan, Russian, Greek, French, Swedish, German, and more

@rjs The more websites I work on, the more I understand why people say IA and graphic design are different skill sets.

@asianmack Companies spend $$$ on interactive microsites. Agencies make $$$ creating them. Who goes there or remembers them? iAds won’t be better.

@jasonfried Excess meetings, documents & policies are the saturated fats, sugars, preservatives & artificial ingredients of business.

Lots of the little stuff that used to wind up here at SvN gets posted by us individually at Twitter these days. So as an experiment, let’s try a wrap-up post featuring highlights from this week’s 37signals staff posts at Twitter.

@rjs Here are some notes on my talk at the School of Visual Arts by @soulellis: http://bit.ly/9MBLig

@jasonfried http://twitpic.com/1ea9hl – The Russian jet train: http://bit.ly/dpeU3f

@dhh The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you”. http://bit.ly/dCLsmW (The Fisherman’s Parable)

@dhh Kindle still owns the iPad for use outside. You can’t see anything but smudges and it overheats in 5-10 minutes in direct sunlight :(

@jasonfried You haven’t blown them away until they send you a check.

@jsierles Travel, but have a modest base. Carry a pen. Put the camera away. Talk to people.

@asianmack For all the praise Apple gets for its quality user interfaces, iTunes really sucks the big one.

@bergatron You can double-tap a paragraph of text with TWO fingers on the iPad to select it. The alternative is four successive single taps.

@mattlinderman Good piece on “Producing Pro Podcasts.” http://emusician.com/tutorials/emusic_producing_pro_podcasts/index.html

@jasonfried Zillow’s iPad app is really well done. Great way to explore homes for sale/rent: http://www.zillow.com/ipad

@mattlinderman Robie House video: Experience a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece from inside. http://bit.ly/9bHKGe

@dhh Talking computer setups at http://david.heinemeier.hansson.usesthis.com/

@rjs “Goodbye Point & Shoots, Goodbye Laptops.” http://bit.ly/d1Apz5

@jasonfried My first article for Inc. Magazine. Also in the April issue on newsstands now: http://bit.ly/d7B66F

@rjs Beautifully simple and complete sketches of splashes and falling drops from “On Growth and Form”: http://bit.ly/a7yCPU

@jasonfried Newsweek on 37signals and REWORK: http://www.newsweek.com/id/235687/output/print

@asianmack Apple’s market capitalization exceeds Walmart’s. Microsoft and Exxon are the only US companies whose market caps exceed Apple’s.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
[Case study] Happy Cog: ”’Photos, or it didn’t happen?’ is how we feel about Basecamp”
“We use Basecamp as a file repository for shared resources, from An Event Apart attendee email boilerplate to every deliverable of every phase of every Happy Cog client job. It’s our discussion forum for the editorial and technical review of every article commissioned by or submitted to A List Apart Magazine. Our A List Apart editorial team edits and copyedits every accepted piece in Basecamp’s Writeboard tab. We also use Writeboard to edit site and newsletter copy and for cross-studio strategic discussions about the agency, the conference, the book series, and the direction of the magazine. And of course we use Basecamp to keep project dates and deliverables on track.”

Freshlog lets you easily take a screenshot, annotate it, and upload it to a Basecamp project
You can send screenshots directly to Basecamp with Freshlog. The app lets you take a screenshot, crop it, annotate it, and upload it to a project.

Tip: Add client names to your Basecamp Milestones for quick scanning on your Dashboard
“We type in the name of the client when creating a milestone. That way, we can see the client that any given milestone relates to on the dashboard.”

Basecamp is now more secure with XSS protection
“We have improved the security of Basecamp against cross-site scripting attacks. This means filtering all HTML posted to messages, comments, and anywhere else you can enter text in Basecamp for JavaScript and dangerous tags.”

How Resolve Digital starts its day: “Coffee. See what’s going on in the world. Basecamp.”
“We also use todos lists not just to log tasks that need to get done, but as a brainstorming tool. For example, we’re using a todo list to document marketing ideas for the upcoming release of a new version Refinery, our Content Management System. The team can then elaborate upon any todo item by posting comments to it.”

How KROME uses TimeTrack to count hours in Basecamp
“I use Basecamp everyday to track my project deadlines, keep everyone on the same page to prevent miscommunication, and, of course, I need to measure the amount of time I’ve spent to always counter check if the project is profitable. TimeTrack is a Basecamp widget on Mac OS that I use as a counter and submit the results directly into the system every time.”

Highrise
Bridge is a Blackberry app for Highrise
Bridge is a subscription based BlackBerry application that enables synchronization and online and offline access to Highrise. (Note: Bridge is not a 37signals product.)

Campfire
Latest Propane update lets you use new Campfire conference calling feature
If you use Campfire with Propane (a Mac download that lets you run Campfire as a standalone app), you can now upgrade Propane and start making conference calls.

UK/Indonesia team leader gives four reasons why using Campfire to communicate can be better than voice discussions
“1. You can take your time. 2. You review what you say before you say it. 3. You have a written record of what you all said, which is super-helpful when you forget why, exactly, you thought that doing such-and-such was a good idea. 4. In-line images.” More details at link.

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The Science of Aesthetics by Keith Lang (video) is a talk Lang gave at UXAustralia in 2009. In it, he talks about how some shapes are naturally friendly looking, like the rounded rectangle, while other shapes are harsher and more unfriendly. Here’s a cool example of how a UI could take advantage of this by using an aggressive, spiky shape:

Interesting idea. People would definitely think twice before clicking a button that looks like it’s going to carve up fingertips.

Craig Mod has an interesting story about publishing a guide book to the Tokyo art world. Here’s Craig’s description of what happened:

I coauthored and designed a guide book to the Tokyo art world: Art Space Tokyo.

It came out in 2008 to much acclaim and sold out rather quickly.

The publisher we originally published with didn’t have the money to support a reprint. It sat in limbo for ages.

This is a niche book — Tokyo & art.

It’s also a beautiful book: silkscreened clothbound hardcover, detailed maps, printed and bound in Japan. Elegant.

The original publisher was talking about reprinting it — cheaply, paperback, disposable. Destroying much of the original charm.

This is ridiculous. So I bought back worldwide publishing rights from the publisher. Drawing inspiration from REWORK — looking sideways, ignoring the ‘usual’ rules of publishing, this is what’s now happening:

Sales folk at traditional distributors push for cheap cheap cheap because it’s easy to sell. The problem is cheap cheap cheap doesn’t generate sustainable profits. And leads to disposable, flimsy books.

Instead of compromise, we’re raising the price. This lets us keep the same high quality, which readers love. It also means the revenue generated by the sales can lead to expansion of the project. Instead of every sale eeking us back to break-even, every sale helps lay the foundation for expanding the project.

Continued…

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Campfire
New in Campfire: Conference calling
Every so often we want to take a particular conversation to a conference call. Sometimes voice is better than typing. So now we just have to click a single link and everyone gets a phone number and PIN code to call in. We can have a quick call and then get back to work. Campfire also uploads a recording of the call back to the room for a record. This is especially useful for anyone who missed the call. You can delete the recording if you’d rather not have it stored permanently.

Highrise
Rooftop app brings Highrise to Android phones
Rooftop, an Android App from Staircase “brings all your Highrise contacts, deals, cases and tasks into an easy to use Android application.”

New in Highrise: Now your Dropbox can attach an email to multiple people
When you bcc: an email to your Highrise Dropbox, and you add multiple people to the “to:” field, Highrise will now attach the email to all the people, not just the first person listed in the “to:” field. Highrise will also add a line (in italics) at the top of the email inside Highrise listing all the contacts in Highrise that received the email.

New in Highrise: Bulk tagging, permissions, delete, and more
1) Bulk tagging, permissions, and delete. 2) Import from Excel. 3) Set permissions when uploading. 4) We’ll help find contact photos for you.

Continued…

It’s been quite a ride since REWORK launched on March 9. We’re proud to say the book has reached #4 in the “Hardcover Advice, How-To, Miscellaneous” category at the NY Times bestseller list in its second week:

Maybe we’ll make an attack ad against Alicia Silverstone next (“She really is CLUELESS!”).

It also debuted at #2 on the list of Best-Selling Hardcover Business Books at the Wall Street Journal:

It’s also #4 at USA Today’s Money Best Sellers list. According to our UK publisher, it will be #1 on the UK Sunday Times business bestseller list this weekend. International copies are out in many parts of the rest of the world too.

Reviews
Best of all, people are loving the book. The average customer review at Amazon is 4.3 out of 5 stars (after 47 customer reviews). Here’s a sampling of reviews REWORK has received so far:

Alexis Rodich, Washington Post: “I want to buy a copy for everyone I know”

Brad Feld, MIT Technology Review: “Brilliant”

Jack Covert, founder of 800-CEO-READ: “I cannot over-emphasize its value”

Kevin Partner, PC Pro: “By far the most useful and provocative business book I’ve read in recent years”

Matt Dunn: “Possibly the most important business book you’ll ever read”

Noah Fleming: “Provides you with more real-world applicable business knowledge than an MBA”

Emails
The emails pouring in from readers have also been really kind. Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to write. Here’s a note from Winn Elliott:

I’m not gonna lie… I didn’t see this coming. I just got my copy of Rework today and have now read it cover to cover. Twice.

Best. Book. I’ve. Ever. Read.

Thank you guys for inspring me to be a better leader. This is exactly what I needed to hear… Confirming both what I’ve done right—and wrong.

Others have had similar kind words and we really appreciate it.

The attack ad
Our ad that “Swift Boated” Karl Rove made its way around the web too. Nearly 40,000 views at YouTube and mentions at Newsweek, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Valleywag, and lots of other places. And, according to one media source we spoke with, Rove has seen the ad and thinks it is “hysterical.”

Interviews
Jason and David recently appeared on ABC News to discuss REWORK with host Tory Johnson.

And here’s an interview with Leo Laporte where David looks like Robocop:

More press is on the way too. One thing we’re still hopeful for: an interview with Charlie Rose. Anyone out there who can help make it happen? Seems like it would be a great fit.

Also, if you find your local Barnes & Noble or Borders store is out of REWORK, please let us know.

Last year we decided to embark on designing our own iPhone app for Highrise. We picked Highrise because there were already some good options for Basecamp, and Campfire was well represented by the wonderful Ember. We thought about Backpack and Highrise and decided to go with Highrise.

Our Highrise customers have been letting us know they weren’t satisfied with the existing iPhone apps for Highrise. We agreed. We wanted the Highrise experience to be great on the desktop and the iPhone.

We dialed up our friends at Overcommitted — the people behind Ember — and asked them if they’d develop a Highrise app for us. It would be an official 37signals product. They said yes. They set up a Basecamp project, invited us in, and we got started.

Which features?

We decided to keep version 1.0 as simple as possible. We focused on contacts and tasks. We left deals and cases out of version 1.0. Those will come later.

We went through a bunch of iterations, UI ideas, layout experimentations, and functionality explorations. We hope to share some of these in a future post. There are some good lessons in there.

Fundamentally we wanted 1.0 to be solid, simple, and searchable. A tool to quickly access your business contacts, leads, tasks, and conversations wherever you are. We also wanted it to be fast so we decided to download all your contacts, tasks, and recent notes/emails to your phone so you had a local database. This way we could reduce network usage and make everything pretty snappy.

Making setup satisfying

When you launch Highrise for iPhone for the first time it will download all your contacts and tasks to your phone. It doesn’t replace your iPhone address book – it just pulls the contacts down into the Highrise database so everything is local and fast.

One of the downsides to the initial download is that it can take some time depending on your connection and the number of contacts you have. Waiting for anything sucks, but what sucks more is being bored while waiting.

So we decided to give you something to do while the initial download is in progress. You can play tic-tac-toe while you wait. Just tap the button and the screen flips to a tic-tac-toe board. The download progress bar remains at the bottom so you see where you are while you tap away your time trying to beat the computer.

Contact search everywhere

This is a quick one, but we wanted to make sure that you could get to any contact from just about every screen in the Highrise iPhone app. So you’ll find a search contacts field at the top of all major screens. Sometimes we hide it to maximize screen space, but just scroll up and you’ll find it.

Color schemes

There are obviously more important features than this one, but we thought it would be fun to point it out. Highrise lets you pick from a variety of color schemes. We wanted to bring that color into Highrise for iPhone. So every time you launch Highrise for iPhone we pick the color from your Highrise account and color the main bar at the top of Highrise for iPhone. Below you’ll find an example in green and one in red. The image on the left is Highrise the web app, the image on the right is the iPhone app.

Voice notes

Since we’re talking about an app for a phone, we might as well take advantage of voice. Highrise for iPhone lets you record voice notes for any of your contacts. Voice notes are uploaded to your Highrise account and playable with an embedded audio player in the Highrise web app. Transcription may be an option down the road.

File attachments

Lastly, Highrise for iPhone lets you view any file types that the iPhone natively supports. This means you can view PDF, DOC, XLS, and other file types that are attached to notes or emails right from the app.

We hope you love it

We’re thrilled to finally release version 1.0 of the Highrise iPhone app. We hope you love it. Thanks again for using Highrise.

This is a guest post by Mike Rohde. We hired Mike to illustrate original art for REWORK. Each one of the 90 essays in REWORK is accompanied by an illustration that captures the key message of the essay. We asked Mike to share the illustration process with you here on Signal vs. Noise. This post is part 2 of a 2-part series.

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In part 1 of 2 of Illustrating REWORK, I wrote about the start of the project, generating concepts and capturing them as pencil sketches for review and approval. In part 2 of 2, I’ll go into depth on the process of converting those pencil concept sketches into final production art for the book.

Inking

Using batches of approved pencil sketches, I began inking illustrations for the book. Batching was important for inking the illustrations, as I could get into a groove and knock out multiple pieces at a time. It also provided a consistency of style, important with such a large group of closely related illustrations.

When I live-sketchnote an event, I listen to a speaker and capture ideas in real-time, using only a gel pen and a Moleskine pocket sketchbook. On the REWORK project I had the luxury and flexibility of taking a more methodical approach to the final illustrations for the book.

Chances were high that I’d see late, last-minute changes in the publishing process and I wanted the ability to make those changes quickly. Rather than inking each illustration as a complete unit, I inked multiple elements separately which were scanned and stitched together in a layered Photoshop document.

First, I created a variety of separate elements on a single spread for multiple illustrations, then used the elements which worked best after scanning the entire page into Photoshop. –Photo by Brian Artka.

Here’s a photo of the final illustration, printed in REWORK. This photo shows how various elements were scanned and stitched together in Photoshop to create a single, unified illustration. –Photo by Brian Artka.

Near the end of the project, I had to make changes to a few of the illustrations. Being able to quickly sketch a few elements, scan and drop them into the Photoshop master file made updates much easier.

Approval and Delivery

Once a batch of inked illustrations were completed in Photoshop, I would export lower-res versions of the pieces as JPG files, and post them to the Basecamp project for Jason’s review. Basecamp’s handy ‘View all of these images at once” feature allowed Jason to scan an entire batch and approve or suggest tweaks.

Here’s a sample batch of illustrations posted to Basecamp for review and approval. Note the PSD file attached to the comments above for backup. Jason was able to click individual illustrations in the grid or select “View all of these images at once” below the images for detailed review.

Continued…

View all of the jobs and internships at the 37signals Job Board.

Design Jobs

Facebook is looking for a Communication Design Manager in Palo Alto, CA.

OkCupid.com is looking for a Web Developer & User Experience Specialist in New York, NY.

Amazon is looking for a Senior User Experience Designer, RCX in Seattle, WA.

FOLIOfn is looking for a Design Lead in McLean, VA.

View all Design Job listings.

Programming Jobs

Barnes&Noble.com is looking for a Front End JavaScript Developer/Ninja in New York City, NY.

Yammer is looking for a Software Engineer – Sr. Web Application Developer in San Francisco, CA.

JibJab Media is looking for a Software Engineer in Venice, CA.

University of Colorado Denver is looking for a Web Developer (Client-Side) in Denver, CO.

View all Programmer Job listings.

Sortfolio Web Designers

Creative Media Alliance is headquartered in Seattle and has a typical project budget of $25,000-$50,000.

COPIOUS is headquartered in Portland and has a typical project budget of $25,000-$50,000.

Blueprint Design Studio is headquartered in Chicago and has a typical project budget of $3,000-$10,000.

Bit Zesty is headquartered in London and has a typical project budget of $10,000-$25,000.

View all Sortfolio listings.