At David’s talk in Austin, he talked about increasing productivity. One thing he mentioned that kills flow: that little unread email count notification in your dock (shown at left).

The solution: In mail.app’s preferences, you can turn it off. Switch it to None and your dock will stop “knocking.”

Now it’s on you to go check email instead of having that count pushed upon you. A subtle shift, but one that can make a powerful difference.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Stylized email notifications
We created new email designs for milestones (and 48-hour milestone reminders), file uploads, messages, to-dos, and comments.

New in Basecamp: Post a message via email
You can now email a message directly to a project. This means you can post messages without even being logged in. Just send a message via email from your desktop, web-based email client, or mobile phone, and it’ll post right to Basecamp as a message.

“Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes” is a comprehensive guide to Basecamp
Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes by Patrice-Anne Rutledge is a new book that’s the most comprehensive guide to Basecamp we’ve ever seen. If you want to know everything there is to know about Basecamp, this is the book for you.

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 1 of a 2-part series. Part 2 will be posted within the next few weeks.

In September 2009, I began work with Jason Fried to create a series of 90 sketchnote illustrations and 10 chapter illustrations for the new 37signals business book, REWORK. In December 2009, I completed the illustration project, delivering final illustrations to the publisher for book production.

Photo of sketches in my Moleskine notebook, featuring “Everyone on the Front Lines” and “Take a Deep Breath” — two illustration concepts for REWORK that are ready for inking. –Photo by Mike Rohde

Project Background

I met Jason after he saw the sketchnotes I’d captured at his first SEED conference in 2007. Those sketchnotes were featured on Signal vs. Noise and led to an invitation to sketchnote the SEED 3 conference in June 2008. The SEED 3 sketchnotes led, in turn, to sketchnoting Jason’s talk on business at Milwaukee’s Discovery World in September 2008.

Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Redesigned messages section
We just launched a redesigned message section in Basecamp. The redesign brings current discussions to the top of the screen for easy discoverability and quick access. We also cleaned up the message design and added avatars to each message in the list.

New in Basecamp: Reply to assignment emails
When you assign a to-do or milestone to someone in Basecamp you have the option of notifying them via email. If you check the box, the person will receive an email listing the to-do or milestone, along with a link back to that to-do or milestone…Now people can reply to the initial notification email for to-dos or milestones and the reply will be automatically posted to the project as a comment. No more potential for lost communications.

Centripetal Software offers comprehensive backup solution for business users of Basecamp
“It will perform a backup of all of your data, files and writeboards from Basecamp and have it delivered directly to you by Dropbox or FTP. You can access your data at anytime because it’s stored in formats you already use, not proprietary formats that requires special software to open. The automated scheduling of the product allows you to setup your backup and then not think about it again. Centripetal Software offers a 30 day free trial on every backup job with prices starting at free forever to $55/month.”

Campfire
New in Campfire: Chat highlights and improved transcripts
The first improvement are chat highlights. Highlights let you mark any line in the chat room with a star. Those starred chats then appear in a special “highlights” section of the transcript letting anyone in your group see what you and others thought was interesting or important on that day. Highlights are a great way to save a chat you’d like to refer to later or emphasize in your group.

New in Campfire: Formatted Tweets
Now you can actually read the tweet in the chat – you don’t have to click over to Twitter to read it anymore. And there’s a bonus: Any tweet you paste into Campfire is now searchable in your transcripts.

Highrise
New in Highrise: A redesigned “stream”
The date is black and bold like before, but the other data is treated more like a traditional email header in an email application. Each main point gets its own line. It’s smaller and a different size/color than the content below. You know where the data ends and the content begins. There’s only one key link on the left side above the content.

New in Highrise: Search for cases and deals in the sidebar
We’ve always had a search field in the sidebar that let you jump straight to a contact. Start typing a name, see a list, hit return to go to the first one or use your mouse or keyboard arrow keys to jump around in the list. Today we added cases and deals to the search. Here’s what it looks like:

Big Think Interview With Jason Fried

Was filmed using Errol Morris’ Interrotron (or a similar device). That’s how you get the direct eye contact. Jason’s take: “Was weird for 5 seconds then it was totally natural.”

The story of the Interrotron is also a neat example of scratching your own itch. Morris explains:

Q: Is it true that you interview people using a machine?

A: Yes, the (patent pending) Interrotron. It’s a machine that uses existing technology in a new and novel way. When I made my first film, Gates of Heaven, I interviewed people by putting my head right up against the lens of the camera. It seemed as though they were looking directly into the lens of the camera, but not really. Almost, but not quite. Of course, they were looking a little bit off to the side.

Q: What’s wrong with that? What were you trying to achieve?

A: The first person. When someone watches my films, it is as though the characters are talking to directly to them… There is no third party. On television we’re used to seeing people interviewed sixty-minutes-style. There is Mike Wallace or Larry King, and the camera is off to the side. Hence, we, the audience, are also off to the side. We’re the fly-on-the-wall, so to speak, watching two people talking. But we’ve lost something.

Q: What?

A: Direct eye contact.

Q: Eye contact?

A: Yup. We all know when someone makes eye contact with us. It is a moment of drama. Perhaps it’s a serial killer telling us that he’s about to kill us; or a loved one acknowledging a moment of affection. Regardless, it’s a moment with dramatic value. We know when people make eye contact with us, look away and then make eye contact again. It’s an essential part of communication. And yet, it is lost in standard interviews on film. That is, until the Interrotron.

Here’s a diagram of how it works and a photo of the device.

Pages 13 & 14 of the January issue of Interface (PDF) feature an article about Jason and 37signals. Interface is a publication of the Chicago chapter of the American Marketing Association.