Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Using Campfire as a note-taking solution and for Getting Things Done
“I feel that Campfire’s excellent real-time record keeping ability, multiple chat room (or page) features, access options, and file management tools are ideal for not only the GTD system but point-of-contact record keeping.”

PluggedOut to “groupware” app customers: “Basecamp provides everything you might need”
“If you’re working in a ‘wide area network’ on a project, it’s essential to have somewhere central that all news, updates, milestones, tasks and such like can be pooled. Basecamp provides everything you might need.”

Get visual alerts every time a new message is posted in Campfire
If you’d like to get a visual alert every time a new message is posted in Campfire (one that’s visible even if your browser window is not), then check out this bit of code Snailbyte cooked up.

We get lots of email from people who want to get our take on this or that or why we do things one way instead of another way.

We thought instead of answering these emails on a one-on-one basis we’d answer them right here so more people can participate in the discussion.

So, we’re looking for interesting questions to answer here at Signal vs. Noise. Got one? Then send it to us at svn@37signals.com (make sure the subject line reads “Ask 37signals”). We’ll cherry pick the most interesting ones and answer them here. Fire away!

Some recent postings at the 37signals Job Board:

ROOV is looking for a RoR Developer (creative) in the US.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is looking for a Web Designer in Washington, DC.

RealTravel.com is looking for a Ruby on Rails Application Developer in Mountain View, CA.

Apple Inc. is looking for a Business Development individual in Cupertino, CA.

Kaboose Inc. is looking for a Web Software Developer in Toronto, Ontario.

Cisco/IronPort is looking for a Sr. UI Architect in San Bruno, CA.

RD2, Inc. is looking for a Web Developer in Dallas, TX.

Yodle, Inc. is looking for a Web Designer in New York.

Outreach, Inc is looking for a Website & Newsletter Coordinator in Vista, CA.

UpGuppy is looking for a Director of Site Development in any location.

Mint Digital is looking for an HTML/CSS/JS developer who wants to learn rails in New York, NY.

Ardent Media is looking for a Director of Engineering in San Francisco, CA.

More jobs…

These are just some of the recent jobs posted on the Job Board. The Job Board is linked up on over 1,000,000 page views a month on some of the industries most highly regarded sites. If you’re looking for a design, programming, copywriting, or IT executive job, take a look.

Oversimplification can be confusing

“When saving a file, you have an option to ‘maximize compatibility’. The thing is, they never tell you what the alternative is. Why would you ever choose to not maximize compatibility? Even worse, the dialog explicitly warns you that turning the option off is a bad idea. Seems like a stupid question then, doesn’t it?”

Change your to-do list into a could-do list

“When I draw up my daily lists of tasks I refuse to see it as stuff I have to get done. When I did that in the past, I’d feel a sense of dissatisfaction at the end of the day when I didn’t have everything ticked off, despite the fact that I knew when I wrote it, it was highly unlikely I’d get to everything. It’s a tiny shift, but by viewing it as a list of things I could do today, I’m relieving the pressure to get them all done. It feels like there’s more of an element of choice around how I spend my time – I don’t have to do x today, I could leave it till tomorrow and focus more attention on y today instead.” [tx SM]

"Atlas Shrugged" influences business execs

“One of the most influential business books ever written…The book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.”

Can China control the weather?

“Every year, China launches thousands of rockets and artillery shells into the sky. They’re not part of a set of war games or preparation for a battle with Taiwan, but rather a battle with the weather. Through its Weather Modification Program, the Chinese government hopes to control the fickle forces behind rain. Run by the Weather Modification Department, a division of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Science, the program employs and trains 32,000 to 35,000 people across China, some of them farmers, who are paid $100 a month to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers.”

Mike Birbiglia cuts a deal with "Glamazon"

Mike Birbiglia’s new comedy album “My Secret Public Journal Live” features this track which discusses how he cut a deal with “Glamazon” to take back a busted tv.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Basecamp feature: Significantly improved search
Today we launch a few major improvements to Basecamp search: 1. Search is significantly faster. 2. You can now search to-dos and milestones. 3. You can now search all your projects at once. We hope the faster, more comprehensive, more flexible search speeds up your productivity.

Campfire + Pyro = Collaboration Heaven
Jordan Golson talks about how Campfire is helping his team collaborate on a new site. “You don’t have to worry about missing anything when you are away from your desk because when you sign back into Campfire, everything that has been said in the past is there waiting for you. It’s great if you work with a bunch of people in all different places and time zones.”

Fuego founder uses Highrise to de-clutter inbox and centralize notes/tasks
“Highrise rocks because it’s the perfect place for me to keep all the notes I used to keep on people locked away in Word notebooks. Now they’re attached directly to the person and searchable.”

How O'Reilly went animal

“Edie Freedman was hired to design the first book covers. She thought the books had the strangest titles — sed and awk? — that evoked images of the popular fantasy game, “Dungeons and Dragons.” While looking for imagery, she came across the Dover Pictorial Archives, a series of books (and now CD-ROMs) containing copyright-free collections of 18th- and 19th-century wood and copperplate engravings of animals. She encountered a pair of slender lorises and had an epiphany. ‘That’s sed and awk!’ She scanned several animals from the archive and placed them on mock-up covers, which she then presented to everyone at O’Reilly. O’Reilly had ten or so employees at the time, and people wondered if the animals were appropriate. But Edie convinced them to follow her instincts. Customers wound up loving the covers, and a brand was born.”

When good design goes bad

“Ah, well. We’ll start over. It’s better to have something we’re both proud off than to try and salvage the work done so far. Sometimes you have to go all the way through the design process before you realize that you’ve built the wrong thing, but it’s ok, it’s a learning experience, it’s not the end of the world to take a deep breath and go back to step 1.”

Leaked Google video discusses Google Reader changes

“Calling tags ’labels’ is called ’kind of a historic accident and needlessly confusing’…Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

How to make Backpack dividers linkable
This tip makes Backpack dividers linkable — that way you can jump directly to a section, which can be helpful on longer pages.

New Highrise feature: Streamlined “edit contact” flow
We pushed an update that streamlines the “edit contact” process in Highrise. Before the update uploading a photo, editing contact information, and changing permissions was a 3-tab multi-click process. Now you can make all these changes on a single tab called “Contact and Permissions.”

Basecamp helps Epsilon Concepts communicate, manage projects, and handle worldwide staff collaboration
“The number one reason we love Basecamp: it’s a powerful, flexible, and extensible application that is actually EASY. Initially, when I decided to implement Basecamp for our project management needs, I was somewhat concerned that our less ‘computer literate’ clients may have reservations about jumping out of their e-mail accounts and into a program like Basecamp. This concern turned out to be completely bogus as to this day we haven’t had a single client that hasn’t been able to instantly understand, utilize, and harness the power of Basecamp.”

The worst strategy is whining

“Whining is rarely a successful response to anything. Instead, start by acknowledging that most of the profit from your business is going to disappear soon. Unless you have a significant cost advantage (like Amazon’s or Wal-Mart’s), someone with nothing to lose is going to be able to offer a similar product for less money. So what’s scarce now? Respect. Honesty. Good judgment. Long-term relationships that lead to trust.”

All about hummingbirds

“Hummingbirds while in flight have the highest metabolism of all animals, a necessity in order to support the rapid beating of their wings. Their heart rate can reach as high as 1,260 beats per minute, a rate once measured in a Blue-throated Hummingbird. They also typically consume more than their own weight in food each day, and to do so they must visit hundreds of flowers daily. At any given moment, they are only hours away from starving.”

You don’t need a plan, you need skills and a problem

“Screw your plans. Work on your skills. Apply them to a problem that is biting you. Flush and repeat until people believe you had a plan.”

7 futuristic interfaces

Listed at the recently launched Oobject (“like Billboard charts for gadgets”).

List of next generation acronyms

GI — Google it, MOP — Mac or PC?, FCAO — five conversations at once, IIOYT — is it on YouTube?, DYFH — did you Facebook him/her?, etc.

Italian Futurists

“At the beginning of the 20th century a small group of artists set out to ‘destroy cultural institutions and create new ones.’ This group became known as the Italian Futurists and their beliefs encompassed many areas of politics and culture. Within literature and visual arts the artists expressed their beliefs in visual poems. These poems took the traditional elements of type, color and page and recombine them in a radical new way through creative typography.”

Webistrano: “Capistrano deployment the easy way”

Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Highrise feature: Dates to remember
By very popular demand we bring you a new feature in Highrise: “dates to remember.” The dates to remember feature lets you keep track of important dates for each contact. You can add their birthday, anniversary, date hired, date fired, date granted a promotion, or whatever other date you want.

Springloops = a subversion host that integrates with Basecamp projects and todos
Cliff Spence writes, “I’ve been using an incredible compliment to Basecamp called Springloops.com for the past few days. If you aren’t aware of it already, it’s a Subversion host with some seriously tight integration with Basecamp’s projects and todos.”

Vector uses Basecamp to communicate with clients, track bugs, and eliminate unnecessary emails
Vector is a New York based web development firm that specializes in making complex solutions seem simple. We talked with Vector’s Matt Weinberg about how Basecamp helps his team communicate with clients, track bugs, and eliminate unnecessary emails.

Campfire is “the businessperson’s answer” to the chat dilemma
“A tool this powerful has the ability to impact traditional forms of communication.”

Greatascent aims to bring Highrise straight into your Mac
Greatascent, in private beta, is a simple application to bring Highrise straight into your Mac.

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How to start writing

“Like a flea market or garage sale, let ideas feel cheap, light and easy to throw around. If you can do that, new work will get off the ground almost on its own.”

The most underappreciated fact about gender: the ratio of our male to female ancestors.

“While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.”

Raymond Loewy

Designer of the Coca Cola bottle, Air Force One, Lucky Strike, Greyhound Bus, Pennsylvania S-1 Locomotive, Exxon and Shell logos, NASA interiors for Sky Lab, and the Avanti, the only automobile to be exhibited in the Louvre.

Typography in “House of Leaves”

“The text of the book is arranged on the pages in such a way that the method of reading the words sometimes mimics the feelings of the characters or the situations in the novel. While characters are navigating claustrophobic labyrinthine sections of the house’s interior, the text is densely, confusingly packed into small corners of each page; later, while when a character is running desperately from an unseen enemy, there are only a few words on each page for almost 25 pages, causing the reader’s pace to quicken as he flips page after page to learn what will happen next.” [tx NM]

iPhone Calculator and Braun ET66 similarities

“Yet another great design tidbit that makes me love my iPhone more and more every day. The GUI is a definitive tribute to Dieter Rams and Lubs Dietrich circa 1977 ET44 and ET66 calculators by Braun.”