Some of the recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Jason F.	goldmine time: http://www.threadlesskids.com/
Ryan S.
Jason F.
Jason F.	How could you not buy that one?
Ryan S.	lol
Jason F.
Matt L.	reminds me of that mitch hedberg joke:
Matt L.	A friend said he wanted to show me a picture of when he was younger. Every picture is of you when you were younger. “Here’s a picture of me when I’m older.” “Son of a bitch. Let me see that camera.”
Jason F.	that was a good one. RIP.
Ryan S.	lol “let me see that camera”
Ryan S.	i wonder if we’re gonna be seeing more and more of this pale blue on the web
Ryan S.	threadless uses it all over. gmail uses it well
Ryan S.	it seems like the new grey of interface chrome

Ryan S.	major hotness:
Ryan S.
Ryan S.
Ryan S.	(http://www.draft.jp/)
Jeremy K.	Love the ‘DRAFT’ font
Ryan S.	totally
Jeremy K.	.jp must be a typographer’s dream
Ryan S.	ha :)

Judo n. Maximum efficiency, minimum effort

Search results for “Judo” at our internal Campfire chat room:

Related:
Software Judo
Words of Wisdom on Learning Judo

The less people are aware of you, the better idea it is to give your product away

“A lot has to do with the ratio of possible consumers of the free product who might be converted to paying customers to the total market size. If I have awareness with .01% of the target market, giving copies away to raise awareness to 10% of the market, where 10% of those might convert (1% total) is a good deal. But if I have awareness with 60% of the target market, and give my product away, with a 10% conversion rate, I’ve lost a great deal.”

Incomprehensible intersections

Photos of traffic-routing gems.

Software development “inventory”

“In software development, inventory is anything that you’ve started and you haven’t gotten done. It’s ‘partially done’ work. In manufacturing if you start making something and it is in-process, it’s not sold, it is inventory. In development it’s the same thing. If you started developing something and it’s not done, it is inventory. What you’re trying to do Lean software development is the least amount of ‘partially done’ work as possible. You want to go from understanding what you’re supposed to do to having it done and deployed and in somebody’s hands as rapidly as possible.” [tx PA]

Marko Karppinen’s CSS column exercise

Click the icons on the upper right to change the number of columns and justification.

The meaning of “The Medium is the Message”

“It is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.’ And it is the character of the medium that is its potency or effect – its message.”

Soigné = make it perfect

“When you have a really important diner – an influential food critic, a chef you admire, anyone the higher ups deem to be important – the soigné level rises to something absurd like “super soigné.” Anything short of culinary perfection means certain death for a cook…Poor orders were not considered – no sauce on the side people, no special requests, no well-done meats. If they didn’t know how to eat, they weren’t going to appreciate what we were putting on their plates.” [via JK]

The command line comeback

“Standard GUIs, with their drop down menus, check buttons, and tree-lists just cannot compare to the range of options that a text interface gives effortlessly. In just five alphanumeric characters, you can choose one out of 100,000,000 possible sequences. And choosing any one sequence is just as fast as any other sequence (typing five characters takes roughly 1 second). I challenge you to come up with a non text-based interface that can do as well.”

Vu Magazine: Photos, Robots and Cutting-Edge Design

“The Maison Européenne de Photographie here in Paris is just wrapping up an exhibition about Vu, the French photo magazine of the 1920s and ‘30s. I expected a nostalgic survey of period feature photography, but instead got a ton of insight into something more contemporary: how technology works to spark design inspiration…the thing that really struck me was the layout of the pages. The design is full of sharp angles and wild proportions—vigorous, effusive, dizzying, almost violent. It commands attention.”

Joel Spolsky's steps to remarkable customer service

“I was sputtering, trying to figure out how best to express my rage at being forced to spend the morning going back and forth. ‘Ah. It’s my fault,’ he said. And suddenly, I wasn’t mad at all. Mysteriously, the words ‘it’s my fault’ completely defused me. That was all it took.”

Entrepreneurs reveal best decisions and worst mistakes at Startupping

“I asked many successful Internet entrepreneurs about lessons they learned starting and running Internet companies. I asked for their best decision and their worst mistake, and I received many insightful replies. Here is the first set of responses.”

The slow mojo-death of Microsoft over the last five years

“Mojo isn’t about what’s right or wrong inside an organization — it has much more to do with what’s going on externally — and how your actions and behaviors make people feel. A wise woman once said that it’s not what you say, but how you make your audience feel that matters.”

The Onion: "Apple Hard At Work Making iPhone Obsolete"

“When the second-generation iPhone comes out this fall, we want iPhone users to feel not just jealous, but downright foolish for owning such laughably primitive technology.”

Some of the recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Jason F.	Firefox3: Web Apps Game changer
Sam S.	JF: that basically amounts to cookies that can store more data
Sam S.	I really don’t think it’ll be a “game changer”
Sam S.	but we’ll see ;)
Ryan S.	BUT THE WEB IS THE NEW PLATFORM
Ryan S.
Mark I.	If you want to give up Rails and write all your apps in Javascript maybe.
Mark I.	I don’t like Javascript that much. :)
Jamis B.	just need a new framework
Jamis B.	“Javascript on Jails” :)
Sam S.	jails is right
Sam S.	that’s what writing a web app in js would feel like
Ryan S.	aren’t google apps written in JS?
Ryan S.	do they generate the JS with magic or something?
Sam S.	from what I understand, the client-side stuff is written in a Java framework that generates JS code
Jamis B.	guh, that’s even worse
Sam S.	at least for gmail

Mark I.
Mark I.	I was flipping through the February 2007 Popular Science when I saw the Backpack Calendar in the corner of the page.
Ryan S.	oh how cool
Jason F.	Woah on the BP Cal!
Ryan S.
Mark I.	I enjoy Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.
Jason F.	MI agree—great pubs

Ryan S.	wow really bizarre marketing from microsoft in asia
Ryan S.	http://whatswrongwithu.com/
Ryan S.	also gates is looking more and more like a squid monster
Ryan S.
Jason F.	LOLOL

Scorcese uses X to mark the spot in The Departed

“As an homage to Howard Hawks’ classic 1932 Scarface, Scorsese scattered Xs throughout the movie (some more subtle than others), using them as a symbol of impending doom.” [via GF]

Eliot Noyes: “The Forgotten Pioneer of Corporate Design”

“It is harder still to explain why the designer and architect, who died in 1977 at age 67, isn’t better known today, when the principles he championed—the notion that good design is good business, for instance, and the belief in interdisciplinary design teams—are now accepted wisdom. Every designer working in or for Corporate America today owes Noyes a debt of gratitude.”

WSJ analyzes social bookmarking sites and says it’s a few power users that dominate links

“The Journal’s analysis found that a substantial number of submissions originated with a handful of users. At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named ‘STONERS’ — in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio — was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list. (Netscape, which gained fame with its namesake browser, is now owned by Time Warner’s AOL unit and operates a news site.) On Reddit, one of the most influential users is 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer.”

Mingling with restaurant customers

“My dad never seemed to be working at all. I’d look on as he mingled with diners, mostly making idle chit chat. With strangers he’d walk up to their tables as they ate and ask them how their meals were. At the tables of regulars he might sit down and share a drink, maybe even roll some dice. It was a fantastic excuse for a job. Or so I thought. It turned out that my dad had the most important job in the place. His endless conversations with patrons clued him into changes he needed to make on the menu. He was quickly able to comp a round of drinks if customers received slow service, nipping their frustration in the bud. They would often tell him how they’d heard about the restaurant, and possibly mention an upcoming party they were planning and did the restaurant do banquets? (answer: of course!)”

Suggestions for improving the Complete New Yorker UI

“Nearly 33% of the vertical space is consumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars segmenting the screen. Combined with the often bizzare and mostly useless ‘Abstract’ below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users make decisions on what to launch in the viewer. Unforgiveable.”

Profile of Jonathan Ive

“We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was. That’s the appropriate thing…The way the parts [of the iPod shuffle] fit together is extraordinarily tight. I don’t think there’s ever been a product produced in such volume at that price, which has been given so much time and care. I’m really excited by that, and even if you can’t articulate its value, at some level I hope that integrity is obvious.”

Gore-Tex is "fostering ongoing, consistent, breakthrough creativity"

“Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication; anyone in the company could speak to anyone else. In essence, he organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams — keeping even the manufacturing facilities to 150 to 200 people at most…[One employee says,] ‘Your team is your boss, because you don’t want to let them down. Everyone’s your boss, and no one’s your boss.’”

2008 candidates and blogs

“Barack Obama was the only one of these candidates that had a way for bloggers to grab the code needed to embed his video into a post or web site…Being on the internet means something different in this election. Having a site isn’t enough any more. These candidates will need to microchunk their messages, and make them available broadly. They need to be reaching audiences not just through The New York Times and CNN, but via blogs and iPods as well. More than anything, they need to reach out to people and talk to them directly without all of the spin.”

Bill Gates' Vista PR lap falling flat?

“When put in this context Microsoft just seems so big and slow and old, hidebound by 30 years of culture and organizational silos that seem impregnable. And it appears that Vista – the product, the PR, the marketing approach – is the result of such an organization. At times brilliant, very heavy, complicated and expensive. This is not a product for today. This is a product for an era when the desktop ruled. And that era is long gone.”

The most underappreciated appliance in your kitchen: the broiler

“If I’d told you I had an appliance that could brown like a grill, was as convenient as your oven, and cooked most food in less than 10 minutes, you’d buy it. But you don’t need to.”

Business advice from David Lynch?

“Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. Feeling correct is a feeling I think everyone knows.”

Steve Ballmer spends one-third of his time meeting with customers

“I get energy from seeing our customers. It reminds me of the things we’re doing well and it also reminds me of the things where we need to improve.”

You only get three seconds to make an impression

“People have forgotten that the most important thing on a website is the content. Not the gradient, not the drop shadow, not even that PhotoShop brush that you thought would be cool as a background image. If your content doesn’t say interesting stuff in a concise manner, then no amount of CSS Zen will help. Writing for the web is the toughest and most important part of developing web sites/applications. Get that wrong, and every other part of the design process from your information architecture through to your IE5.5 on OSX CSS hacks just doesn’‘t matter.”

Video: Real worldish use of multi-touch driven screens

Jeff Han and Phil Davidson demonstrate how multi-touch screens “will change the way we work and play.” Examples include usage in image editing, web browsing, creating 3D animations, etc. [tx ML]

Fotolog and Flickr neck and neck

“Perhaps this is a sign that those folks trapped in the Web 2.0 bubble are not being critical enough about what is responsible for success on the Web circa-2007…Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”

What’s your favorite building? Link it up.

For example…

Continued from Part 1...