Ok, we’re really close now. Here comes an especially useful Highrise feature: Email-in.

Highrise and email play well together
Highrise isn’t an email program. You don’t compose emails in Highrise. But Highrise likes getting emails. It likes helping you clear your inbox. It likes getting an email from you and doing something useful with it.

Your own dropbox
Every Highrise user get an email dropbox when they create their account. A dropbox takes this form: [email protected]. The “12345678” is a unique PIN. When you send, cc, bcc, or forward emails to that address, Highrise knows they are from you. Then Highrise goes to work.

Email to notes
Notes are an important part of Highrise. Notes from phone calls, meetings, conversations, prospects, etc. When something happens with a person that’s important to your business (or group or organization) you create a note in Highrise on that person’s page so you have a historical record of that conversation or interaction.

Lots of those interactions happen via email. A client sends you an important email or you get a new business lead via email. Maybe your attorney sends you something via email that you want to make sure you keep around.

When you get an important email from someone that you want to log in Highrise, just forward that email to your dropbox address and Highrise will attach it to the right person’s page in your Highrise account. And, if that person doesn’t already exist in your Highrise account Highrise will create that person on the fly for you. Sending email from new people to Highrise is one of the easiest ways to actually create people in Highrise.

We’re pretty close now so it’s time to reveal the meat and potatoes of Highrise: People and Companies. Highrise is all about people. Who you (or your co-workers) talked to, what was said, and what needs to be done next for/with these people/companies.

People
Every contact in Highrise gets a page. You and your co-workers can add notes from calls, conversations, meetings, or any other historic information about this person to this page. You can also attach files, attach notes to cases (more on cases in another post), and set permissions on specific notes. It’s sort of like a weblog about each person you do business with.

In the sidebar of a contact page you’ll find any tasks related to that contact, the ability to add a new task about that contact, contact info, and an “about” section where you can post their bio, background, or anything else that might be relevant.

To add a new note for a contact just type it in the box at the top of the screen and click the “Add this note” button. Data entry is rocket fast with no barriers.

We try to share a lot about our business, how we think, what we do, why we make the decisions we make, what we think works and what doesn’t work, etc.

What haven’t we talked about that you are interested in? I can’t guarantee we’ll have an answer, or be able to share the answer, but we’ll answer what we can.

We may answer some of these as comments and others we may answer as entire posts. We’ll see.

The Deck, our premier advertising network for creative, web and design professionals, is expanding again. It’s obvious that the independent publishing efforts of our four new members come first and foremost from the heart, and we’re happy to be able to support them and happier still to count them as friends.

Khoi Vinh is the Design Director for The New York Times online and he joins the net with his beautiful, measured and insightful Subtraction.com. Tina Roth Eisenberg is the force behind Swiss Miss, a design journal of infectious enthusiasm and unrelenting good taste. Greg Storey has a rare combination of skills. He’s a clear, concise and conversational writer and you could also use the same adjectives to describe his trend-setting modern web design work. You can find Greg at Airbag Industries. There is only one Zeldman, although with the amount of stuff he’s involved in, that fact seems more and more improbable every day. Z has been publishing about his life as a designer and writer at zeldman.com since 1995. He is also a founding member of The Deck, through his stewardship of the mighty A List Apart. Welcome all.

Zappos is looking for a Web Producer in Henderson, NV.

UCLA is looking for an Experienced PHP/MYSQL Developer in Los Angeles.

Zagat is looking for a Senior Web Developer in NYC.

American Century Investments is looking for a Senior Web Developer III in Kansas City, MO.

Yahoo is looking for a CSS & OO Javascript Guru in Sunnyvale, CA

MIT Media Lab is looking for a Web Systems Programmer in Cambridge, MA.

Designkitchen is looking for a Senior Web App Developer in Chicago, IL.

MoralMetric.com is looking for a Ruby on Rails Engineer in Golden, CO (or remote).

The First Post is looking for a Senior Web Designer/Developer in Kensington, London, UK

Kinetic Web Solutions is looking for a Developer in Limerick, PA.

Baker Library, Harvard Business School is looking for a Director, Web & Intranet User Experience (Information Products Group) in Boston, MA.

Find a job or put your design or programming in job in front of the best on the Job Board.

So far we’ve talked about the big picture, permissions and groups, the welcome and workspace tabs, and adding people to Highrise. Next we’re going to talk about Tasks.

Now/Next
Tasks are a huge part of Highrise. Highrise follows the now/next idea—log the notes of what just happened now and set up your next action. For example: [A NOTE NOW] “Just got off the phone with Walt. We discussed the new product, who it’s for, the ideas behind it, use-cases, etc.” [A TASK NEXT] “9am tomorrow: Send full press kit”

I don’t know exactly when, but sometime
Sometimes things happen right on time. Sometimes you do have a call at 9am sharp tomorrow. But often times you have “stuff” you need to get done sometime tomorrow or sometime this week or next week. And often times you just have stuff you need to get done later. Highrise lets you gracefully deal with tasks with hard and fast dates/times and tasks with suggested time “buckets.” 9am tomorrow is hard and fast, “this week” is a bucket.

The conveyor belt
Most buckets are on a conveyor belt. Later always stays later unless you have dated/timed items in there. Dated/timed items will move based on today’s date. Next week becomes this week. This week becomes overdue. Tomorrow becomes today. Today becomes overdue.

Movie: Watch a task being added. You’ll see you can specify a time for near-time items (today or tomorrow), leave the time off entirely so the task is due “sometime today,” specify a future bucket “next week” or “later,” or specify a specific date/time in the future via a calendar.

If you use Apple’s Mail.app, check out this tip. It really works. It’s like night and day for me.

Computerworld’s list includes Advanced CPU architectures, Hosted hardware, Ultra-Wideband, NAND drives, and Ruby on Rails. I don’t know if the list is in order, but Rails is listed as #1.

Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications… Released in 2004, RoR is an open-source project that originally served as the foundation of a project management tool designed by Web development company 37signals LLC. It is easily ported among Linux, Windows and Macintosh environments, and it can have a dramatic impact on the speed at which a Web development team is able to build and maintain enterprise Web sites and applications.

They also go on to list a few notable apps based on Rails and note that Rails will be shipped with OS X 10.5 Leopard.

So far we’ve talked about the big picture, permissions and groups, and the welcome and workspace tabs. Next we’re going to talk about adding people to Highrise.

Adding people manually
Speed is king. We’ve taken speed into consideration every step of the way in Highrise. And there’s more to speed than just page load. Speed also involves thinking about what information you ask for and when you ask for it. It goes beyond just required and optional fields. It’s about presentation.

The add a person page just asks for a few key data points. First name, last name, title, and company (and only first name is required). You can add contact information (phone, email, IM, address, etc.) now or later. You can also set permissions now or later.

Adding people with vCards
Adding people manually is great for one-offs or someone you just met or a lead that just called on the phone. But sometimes you already have people’s contact information elsewhere. Sometimes you have a lot of people to get into Highrise quickly. Enter vCards.

With Highrise you can upload a vCard to create people or augment an existing person quickly. Highrise can also accept a single vCard with multiple people. For example, the Apple Address Book allows you to export all your contacts into a single vCard. Highrise can read that card and import all those people at once.

Last week we pushed a major change to the Campfire transcript browser. The change was made for a variety of reasons – some of which I’ll detail below – but mostly in response to the flaws in our original “wouldn’t it be cool if…” design. We confused enthusiasm with priority.

Here’s what the transcript browser looked like before last week’s change.

I’ll take you through the original idea behind the design and then the reality of experience with a year under our belts.

1. We thought it would be great if you could click a room name to filter the transcripts by room so we built that functionality into the first column. Reality: Most people just use one or two rooms for everything. We kept filtering in the new design, but we de-emphasized it since it’s not that important.

2. We thought it would be really useful to be able to not only filter by room, but also filter by person. Just show me the chats that Jamis Buck was involved with. Reality: Theoretically useful, but rarely used. The overhead to build this list and deal with per-person filtering was not worth the cost – not by a longshot.

3. We thought that listing every single day since you signed up would be a useful way to get at past transcripts. Reality: The most common scenario is wanting to jump back to a recent chat that happened sometime in the past few weeks. Remembering which day something happened from 8 months ago is less likely than just searching for some keywords.

4. We thought a single narrow column to display transcripts, people in those chats, and files uploaded on those days would be enough space. Reality: A single active room could take up 10” of vertical space or more. A tall, narrow column is not the ideal layout for browsing through past chats.

5. We thought the old transcript browser would be fast. Reality: The old transcript browser was embarrassingly slow. The design demanded it pull too much complex data too often. It was fine for your first two weeks of using Campfire, but the slowdown was exponential the more you used it. Not good.

We realized that the transcripts were the most important things on the screen – not the navigation to get to them. Just give me the transcripts!

So we redesigned it keeping “it’s the transcripts, stupid” in mind.