Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Campfire
See your team’s Twitter posts inside Campfire
“Last week, Des suggested that it would be great if we could see things that team members were posting on Twitter from inside Campfire…A small script now runs every minute and pulls in the feed and posts new updates to Campfire. Now we can keep a track of the conversations we’re having outside Campfire, inside Campfire. I’ve published the source code to the script on GitHub if you’d like to play with it yourself.”

Backpack
Home organization expert on Backpack: “It’s like magic! My respite of order in a chaotic world.”
“I log in to Backpack from home on Sunday and note on the Writeboard what I plan to cook for those evenings. I also list what ingredients we’ll need to buy at the Farmer’s Market or grocery store. I can even include a link to the recipe, if applicable. He can do the same for his cooking days. We can also make note of who will go to the grocery store, and whose turn it is to clean up the kitchen each night. The end result is a comprehensive meal plan for the whole week, including menu and shopping reminder list, which we can either print out or access from work, home or on an iPhone!”

Continued…

We’re experimenting with some new post styles here at Signal vs. Noise (quick quotes, links, photos, etc.) These will allow us to share quick bits that we find interesting without doing a full blown post. You can see a couple of examples in the two previous posts. These posts will show up indented and, for now, comments are disabled on them. Still tweaking so stay tuned.

Programming/Tech Jobs

New York University is looking for a Programmer/Analyst – Interface Designer in New York, NY.

OpenCongress.org is looking for a Rails + MediaWiki Programmer located anywhere.

ActiveRain is looking for a Rails Magician in Seattle, WA.

NY Times is looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer in New York, NY.

Connected Ventures is looking for a PHP / MySQL Developer in New York, NY.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is looking for a Web Developer (LAMP) in Washington, DC.

Crispin Porter and Bogusky is looking for an Interactive Developer (Flash) in Miami, FL or Boulder, CO.

TheLadders.com is looking for a Software Engineer in New York, NY.

The George Washington University Department of Health Policy is looking for a Web Communications Specialist (Research Associate) located in Washington, DC.

Redpoint Technologies is looking for an Adobe Flex Senior Software Engineer in Chicago, IL.

Check out all the Programming Jobs currently available on the Job Board.

Design Jobs

Songbird is looking for a Visual Designer in San Francisco, CA.

eBay/Kijiji is looking for a Head of User Experience in San Jose, CA.

Wall Street On Demand is looking for an Interface Designer in New York, NY.

TechSmith Corporation is looking for a User Experience Designer in Okemos, MI.

Crate and Barrel is looking for a Senior Internet Art Director in Northbrook, IL.

Abcam is looking for a Web Designer in Cambridge, UK.

Interactive Factory is looking for a Front-End Web Developer in Boston, MA.

PARTNERS+simons is looking for an Information Architect/User Experience in Boston, MA.

Zepinvest is looking for an Web Designer and UI specialist in New York, NY.

Check out all the Design Jobs currently available on the Job Board.

More jobs!

The Job Board is flush with great programmer and designer jobs all over the country (and the world). The Gig Board is the place to find contract jobs.

Photos of Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes captured from Jason Fried’s talk at Discovery World, Milwaukee, WI on September 24, 2008. This talk was sponsored by Milwaukee Area Technical College. View the archived live video from the event.

Special thanks to Vicky Hennegan (MATC teacher and proprietor of Remarkable Parents) for making this event happen, Melissa Pierce (Life in Perpetual Beta Movie for keeping me company there and back, and to Matt (last name unknown) for his nighttime camera work for Melissa’s interview.

Related: Links to more of Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes from 37signals events.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
[Case Study] UK-India development team keeps the beat with Basecamp
“We can all communicate in an efficient way and if we need to discuss or share something about a project, it goes on Basecamp. No longer are we searching our Inbox for Photoshop designs, snippets of source code or finding out what happened to a task. We all simply log onto Basecamp and there is everything we need, in one place. It’s that simple.”

Just updated Project Recon lets Windows users bring Basecamp projects and to-dos to the desktop
Project Recon, which gives Windows users browserless access to Basecamp projects and time, just released a major update with a completely redesigned interface (inspired by the iPhone).

Backpack
Backpack reminders can help you quit smoking
“What the World’s Healthiest Guys Know” [Men’s Health] talks about quitting smoking. The magazine’s hot tip? Use Backpack to send yourself daily text messages encouraging quitting. A study showed that reminders like that double your chances of success.

Tips on using Backpack for travel planning
“With Backpack, I can create a page far in advance to capture the basics of the trip. I was recently at a conference in Copenhagen for example where I had registered about 6 months in advance. I created the page, forwarded my registration confirmation to it, and the info was there waiting for me to polish off the details later on when the event was closer.”

Getting Real
Getting Real helps teachers too
“many Getting Real ideas are well suited for teaching, e.g. ‘Test in the wild.’ As a teacher, you can have a million great ideas and approaches to teaching. Many teachers try to work out perfect solutions spending a lot of time BEFORE the first run. If it turns out that the idea does not work well, this time is wasted. Instead, I’m trying to do a “rough version one” and if it looks promising I do “iterative cycles” polishing the procedure.”

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A recent Screens Around Town post prompted a healthy debate about crowdSPRING and designers working on spec. We invited crowdSPRING’s Ross Kimbarovsky to write more about the issue. Below is his response.

For those who haven’t heard about us: crowdSPRING is the creative marketplace, where buyers post creative projects (logos, websites, print design, illustrations, marketing materials, etc.) and instead of receiving bids and proposals, designers from around the world submit actual designs. Buyers choose the design they like. Since our launch in May 2008, 700 buyers from 30 countries have posted creative projects. Today over 6,100 designers from 130+ countries work on crowdSPRING. We’re in Chicago, a few blocks from 37signals. We make products we like (we used our own marketplace to design our site – the designer was a 20 year old student from the Netherlands) and we believe others will like them too.

Our business model differs from offline and online design shops and from other marketplaces. Because buyers on crowdSPRING select from actual designs, designers on crowdSPRING submit work on spec. “Spec” is a short name for doing any work on a speculative basis, without a prior agreement that you’ll be paid for your work.

Some in the design community object to work on spec. AIGA, the U.S. professional association for design discourages designers from doing work on spec. A few years ago, the NO!SPEC campaign was founded to organize people who object to work on spec.

When we started working on crowdSPRING in 2006, we noticed that some companies (iStockphoto, Threadless) were succeeding with business models that allowed professionals and non-professionals to fairly compete against each. Today, we believe even more strongly than we did in 2006 that there is an underground, underdog community of creatives that is shaping the Internet. They are the future. They’re writers and inventors, photographers and designers, musicians and coders. They post videos to YouTube, photos to iStockphoto, t-shirt designs to Threadless. They write great code.

The establishment has long held that these ‘amateurs’ – students and stay-at-home moms, freelancers and fed-up corporate refugees – are nothing more than a novelty and are not capable of competing with the ‘professionals.’ The establishment is wrong. The Internet has blurred the boundaries between professionals and non-professionals. The underdogs are challenging tradition in industry after industry. They are risk takers. They are true entrepreneurs. The underdogs compete on their ideas and their work, not education, training, and fancy offices. They make things they like and they hope that other people will like them too.

Continued…

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Backpack
Backpack helps researcher working in imaging of ancient texts
“Where Backpack really shines is in its ability to share data. It lets me pull together notes, images, and lists to quickly share results with colleagues in a clean, professional layout. Since I work in imaging and visualization, galleries let me easily share images of all sizes with a small preview and some optional descriptive text, on the same page with any other information I want to get across. It’s only a short step up from there to have a page other people can readily collaborate on.”

Basecamp
[Case Study] Leading martial arts site: “Basecamp is a complete necessity for us”
“As a start-up business (growing from nothing last year to being now one of the leading online martial arts communities) our team of 4 constantly sing the praises of Basecamp. The fact we are not yet office based and are all working remotely (often odd hours) has made Basecamp a complete necessity for us. The days of a disorganised million emails flying back and forth are gone thankfully!”

Further clarification on the IE 6 phase out
“It’s unlikely that anyone using IE 6 with Basecamp will run into any problems in the near future, but it’s important to keep in mind that any future upgrades might not work with IE 6.”

Video: One Year of Using Basecamp
“I can’t imagine managing web projects without it. I want to share with you a fun video he did showcasing the power of messaging through Basecamp. We exploited the tool as much as it would let us, to stay on the same page with designers, developers, project managers and representatives from several different departments throughout the school.”

Continued…

Training and marketing as taxes
“Training is a tax you pay for a lousy hiring environment…Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.”
-Robert Stephens of Geek Squad in A Geek’s Guide to Great Service

Complex UIs
“Why do software designers want their work to appear more complex instead of less? I just don’t get why they don’t get it.”
-David Pogue in It’s the Software, Not You

Choosing between safety and risk
“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.”
—Abraham Maslow on 8 Ways to Self-Actualize

Launch quickly
“One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it’s released; you can see that from the rush of work that’s always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it’s only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.”
-Paul Graham in The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

Design languages that can grow
“The main thing Guy Steele asks during the lecture is ‘If I want to help other persons to write all sorts of programs, should I design a small programming language or a large one?’ He answers that he should build neither a small, nor a big language. He needs to design a language that can grow. A main goal in designing a language should be to plan for growth. The language must start small, and the language must grow as the set of users grows.”
From Growing a Language by Guy Steele [good coders code, great reuse]

Software stays healthy
“It can be hard for a business to stay ahead if its technology is falling behind. That is one reason that despite an uncertain economy, worldwide information technology spending is on track to reach $3.4 trillion in 2008 — an 8 percent increase over 2007, according to the research firm Gartner. Of all spending categories, software and services are set to show the healthiest growth — with projected increases of around 10 percent each.”
From In a Downturn, but Still Spending on Technology [NY Times]

Chicago-style software
“There’s the dot-com, Silicon Valley, blow-all-your-money-on-booze style. Then there’s the Chicago thing: Do something, do it well and be modest about it.”
-Adrian Holovaty from EveryBlock.com in Cyberstar [Chicago Tribune]

Get on with it
“Test just enough to know what your gear can do, and then get on with real photography.”
-Ken Rockwell in The Seven Levels of Photographers

Deleting code
“Abandoning a speculative peice of functionality just allowed me to delete 2/3 of this module’s code. I got all 37signals on its ass.”
-Mike McCaffrey

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
Top magic site thrives due to Highrise and Getting Real
“The real crux of our system is Highrise. We use it in managing projects, production, post-production, and marketing. We use it to stay organized. We use it to manage our authorized retailer clients around the world. And we couldn’t breathe as well or sleep as well without it.”

Backpack
All about tags in Backpack
A tag is a simple label or keyword you can use to categorize your Backpack pages any way you want. Then when you click a tag you can see all the other pages that have that tag. It’s a great way to keep your pages loosely grouped in ways that make sense to you.

Scottish wood floor company runs its business using Backpack
“Our first task was to store documents that we use on to our ‘Important Documents’ page. Traditionally these documents were stored on our company server but it was sometimes problematic accessing these via a VPN if we were working from home or abroad. Accessing them on the cloud via Backpack has simplified this task and we are now working faster and with less hassle.”

McKay Hardwood Flooring, a Backpack customer, installed the flooring throughout the National Galleries of Scotland.

Basecamp
Embedding a tutorial video into a Basecamp project
“I used the same idea to embed our Camtasia videos into our Tutorials project… solves a huge issue for me since before I could only add a link to the video … I have attached a image of how it looks. It was a great help.”

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Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
[Case Study] Marketing firm BKWLD loves Basecamp because it’s “intuitive, easy to use, and easy on the eyes”
“Private messages and to-do lists were a godsend for one client. This was a particularly challenging project for an extremely difficult client. Private messaging in Basecamp gives us control of our client’s perception of their project, while still allowing us to be explicit with its nitty-gritty parts all in one convenient place. Sometimes the work gets a little ugly, but keeping a professional facade is extremely important to some clients. Basecamp accommodates this nicely.”

BKWLD’s Dashboard.

How Blutique uses Litmus and Basecamp to deliver page and test results to clients
Silas Peterson of Blutique, an interactive consultancy located in New Orleans, Louisiana, writes in to tell us about how his team uses LitmusApp inside of Basecamp to deliver page and email platform test results to their clients.

Litmus and Basecamp.

Backpack
“Backpack has changed my life”
“I’m able to use this extremely affordable system to manage small projects, allow people to collaborate, image files, create lists, assign tasks, edit and share calendars and more…I think this is an excellent solution for small companies and start ups.”

Highrise
How do I build a bulk mailing list in Highrise?
You can do this by giving each contact you want on the mailing list the same tag and then exporting the list…Click the “Tags” tab and click that specific tag to bring up all contacts on your list. Then click the “Export” link in the sidebar. Choose the format you want and save the list. You can then import this list into the application that you use to send group emails, create mailing labels, etc.

Multiple products
Less Accounting, more Basecamp and Highrise
“Accounting sucks. Less Everything makes it suck less. Our flagship product, LessAccounting.com was built with ease-of-use at the core of the accounting software, which caters to small businesses and freelancers. The app just got even better by integrating with Basecamp and Highrise to make importing contacts ridiculously simple.”

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