“The conventional wisdom in our business is that you have to grow and keep moving to survive. We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it served us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients.”
-Stefan Sagmeister (link)

“Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.”
-Joel Spolsky (link)

“In the abstract, freedom of choice is desirable. But the arts, including the culinary arts, function more efficiently as dictatorships. Down with interactivity. Readers do not really want to decide what happens in the next chapter of a novel, and diners are happiest submitting to the iron will of a good chef.”
-William Grimes, former restaurant critic of The New York Times (link)

“I never think about the audience. If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.”
-Wall-E creator Andrew Stanton (link)

“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”
-Jeffrey Zeldman (link)

“Our sound is defined by what we left out and didn’t play, as much as by what we did. I think in a loose way the idea of keeping it minimal goes beyond just the music. It’s my whole approach to everything. Don’t say too much whenever possible. We’re just trying to get the most impact out of the least amount.”
-Glenn Mercer of The Feelies (link)

“Early unsuccessess shouldn’t bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody.”
-Philip Johnson, Architect (link)

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Backpack
CSS tip for customizing the appearance of Backpack pages
“You may sometimes wish you could modify the text on a page to fit a little more information on it. I have a page where I collect code snippets and terminal commands and the default font seems a bit large with so much content. Turns out there’s an easy solution to this: simply add a small amount of CSS to the page in the form of a note and you can change the formatting to meet your needs.”

Use Jott to transcribe a voice message and post it to your Backpack homepage
Jott converts your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments. You can even use it to transcribe a voice message and post it to your Backpack homepage.

Highrise
New Highrise Feature: Better contact filtering
We recently launched an improved contact filter in Highrise:

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
AgileAgenda: a project scheduling application that integrates with Basecamp
“AgileAgenda integrates with Basecamp by synchronizing its scheduled tasks with todo items in Basecamp so you can share what tasks people should be working on. When someone marks a todo item complete in Basecamp, AgileAgenda will take that information and update the schedule the next time it’s synced up. Basecamp can help get things done, AgileAgenda will tell you when that will happen.”

Getting Real
FuelFrog uses Getting Real to keep things ultra-simple
“We built it by keeping things ultra-simple and released it with only the absolute necessary features. We even left out the ability to delete/edit your fuel records or the ability to recover your lost password. We launched the application three weeks ago and have spent nothing on marketing/advertising and currently have over 2,800 users. People really appreciate the simplicity and usefulness of the application.”

Backpack
Mac users: Create a Backpack Journal Dashboard widget using Safari’s webclip button
“So I have grabbed the updating part of the page as per the widget described and also the team’s recent updates. As a double bonus, it updates the clips when you invoke Dashboard so you get the latest team updates straight away rather than what you’d normally be having to do is refresh your browser’s page yourself.”

“And this is what mine looks like on my Dashboard.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
Import RSS feeds into Basecamp with telegraph
Using telegraph you can import RSS or Atom information from other systems into your Basecamp account.

fixx is a new bug tracking and issue tracking system for software teams that integrates with Basecamp
“fixx integrates with Basecamp by allowing you to import your existing projects, milestones and users. This allows you to kick-start your usage of fixx and re-use existing project information, without having to spend your valuable time replicating data that you already have in use.”

Variety Club of Great Britain uses Basecamp to help disadvantaged children
For more than 50 years, Variety Club Children’s Charity has been helping sick, disabled and disadvantaged children in Great Britain. They recently began using Basecamp and Chairman Len Keighley wrote to tell us how much it’s helped.

Campfire
Virb can’t imagine life without Campfire
“I honestly can’t see how our team ever did without it. Campfire is open in a browser tab all day long. It’s launched when the day begins on the east coast and isn’t closed until the last left coast’er signs off in the evening. We fire-up iChat for group audio chats several times a day, but otherwise, no project communication happens outside of ‘the campfire’.”

What is Git?
Git is a directory content tracker (i.e. it lets you keep track of the contacts of directories as they change over time). It was developed originally by Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) in 2005.

What do we use it for?
Until a couple of weeks ago, we were using Subversion for keeping track of our source code. We’re now about a third of the way into converting everything to git (a surprisingly straightforward process, thanks to the git-svn utility).

So git is our source code manager of preference these days. Whenever someone makes a change to one of our applications or dependencies, they check the change into the central repository via git, and the other developers can then merge those changes into their own repositories. Git makes much of this insanely easy, compared to Subversion.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
Mailmanagr allows you to send e-mail messages to various categories within your Basecamp projects
“Mailmanagr, in it’s current form, will allow you to send e-mail messages (complete with attachments) to various categories within your Basecamp projects. You can set up an e-mail address for each category, or just set up an “E-mail dropbox” category, and create an address for that.”

Backpack
Video: Backpack tips for dragging
This video shows you how to use the Home/End and Page Up/Down keys for dragging items around a Backpack page quickly. Also, you’ll see how easy it is to drag an item to a page in the sidebar.

Productivity blogger calls Backpack “insanely easy”
“I’ve also been continually using their Pages feature in many different ways. One time I used it to keep a rolling ToDo list for things I needed to do during Annual Training. Another time I used it to keep track of the wines that we like. Another use has been as a shared project tracker. It’s really so easy and modular that you can use it for about whatever you need. Rarely have I used a product that was so easy, and I dare say fun, that it encouraged me to use it more. Backpack does that to me on a daily basis.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Extras
Dashboard widget for Backpack Journal
You can post your status and create new journal entries right from your Dashboard thanks to Roobasoft.com’s Dashboard widget.

Case studies
How eduFire operates as a virtual company using Basecamp, Campfire, and Highrise
“We needed a piece of CRM software that would allow our team members to add contact information, make notes and share contacts remotely…We needed it to require as little training as possible (many of the people inputting data on the tutors were part-time workers or interns). Before Highrise, there wasn’t anything that would have worked (I know…we looked!). Using Highrise we were able to recruit hundreds of tutors and manage their information very efficiently.”

Buzz/press
Washington Post: Highrise “does nearly everything a personal secretary might do except go out for coffee and pick up our dry cleaning”
“We can’t afford to hire an administrative assistant, which is why we use Highrise. Nominally an online CRM tool, 37signals’ clever Web app does nearly everything a personal secretary might do except go out for coffee and pick up our dry cleaning…Highrise makes the job easy: Just bcc e-mail messages to a special ‘dropbox’ address, and your recipient’s address joins your contacts database automatically. You can then copy and paste their phone number, physical address, and other info at your leisure.”

A couple of new internal rules at 37signals that we thought we’d share:

Owning the launch too
Lately we’ve had a couple of features, fixes, and tweak lately that have been sitting idly done waiting either for deployment or for input from someone else like design.

So we’re establishing a ground rule: If you’re working on the feature, you own the feature. You’re responsible for involving everyone that needs involving. And do it forcefully.

If you’re a developer and you need input from design, grab a designer and tell them that the feature won’t launch until they deliver X. That’ll get ‘em fired up to get it done!

If you need to have the feature deployed and you’re not confident doing it on your own, book a specific time with Mark to make it happen, so you both can be around.

It feels great to be done with something on the programming side and then feeling free to move on to the next thing. We all do that at times. But it’s not really real until our users are able to enjoy it.

The 2-week plan
We’re also worried that we’re keeping our heads down too long on projects. We’re not stopping, looking around, and deciding where to go next early enough. Things are lingering too long without reality checks.

So here’s the rule moving forward: If someone is working on something for two weeks, stop. Then post a message to the Basecamp project. Use one of three choices (you can also pitch multiple options):

1. Provide an ETA on completing the project and create corresponding milestones in BC for the phases/completion.
2. If you don’t see an end in sight, ask for judo help to get it done sooner. Always consider that there’s a significantly simpler solution than the one you are working on.
3. Suggest abandoning/shelving the project.

The goal here is to not let weeks and weeks and weeks pass before deciding to either judo something or kill it. We’re not using our time efficiently if we’re tangled up and not asking for help. There’s no pride in pushing through something without being able to see the end.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Extras
New version of Ta-da Lists Widget released
Having problems with your Ta-da Lists Widget? Then go ahead and download v1.3, released today.

Case Studies
Getting the most out of Backpack as a GTD (“Getting Things Done”) solution
“For example, I’ve been invited to a special luncheon with the Internal Revenue Service in a couple of weeks, and they’d like me to bring along a few things (financial records and such). Before Backpack, it would’ve ended up with me emailing myself a pantload of PDF bank statements, then aggregating all of those emails under a specific gmail tag. Obviously, that would have gotten extremely unwieldy in short order. Now I have all of those PDFs arranged nicely on a few Backpack pages (where you can actually store the files, not just link to them), as well as notes about specific items, a picture of my daughter and a copy of the Gettysburg Address.”

Photographer calls Getting Real “one hell of a damn good book”
“When I first looked at starting out as a photographer I put together a shopping list of equipment that I MUST HAVE! Without this list I thought I would never start. It was £20,000 in size. And would have made me spend a huge waste of time doing cashflow predictions and presentations to bank managers and investors. Why did I not think my current camera would suffice, or my computer, or my printer. I ended up spending £700 on some studio lights a background and some business cards. Like that, I’m ready to go.”

R.O.Why! Marketing saves money and time with Basecamp
“I just want you to know that Basecamp is saving my business hundreds of dollars a month since switching. Used to use a huge, cumbersome, complicated and headache-producing project management & client collaboration software system that clients hated to use. And it was expensive. And did I mention that we couldn’t get clients to use it? It took a couple hours or more to set up a complex project. With Basecamp, I’m done – including milestones & tasks – in 15-30 minutes and every one of our clients uses it and loves it.”

Revixio, creators of CorePage, inspired and informed by Getting Real
“We had always wanted to work the way that was outlined in the book; getting the majority of the UI nailed down first, and using that as a blueprint for coding, rather than page after page of functional specs, so that part was an easy sell. In fact, as I spoke with others involved in application development that I told about this, they were jealous that their companies didn’t work this way. It not only made sense, but really allowed us to see things from the user’s point of view very early on.”