37 Signals is on a roll

In case you haven't been paying attention, 37 Signals has been hitting a lot of high notes lately. It's great to see, because I admire the 37 Signals guys tremendously, and I believe firmly in their approach to application development and their business philosophy.

As I mentioned last week, DHH won the OSCON Hacker of the Year award.

37 Signals hit the cover of Salon last week in an article by Farhad Manjoo. You're not going to learn anything new* in this article, but it's nice to see 37 Signals and Ruby On Rails get some mainstream recognition.

Kathy Sierra (whose books I have bought and whose blog I have read) had a nice write up on the team as well. This is a wonderful distillation of just what it is allowing 37 Signals to makes waves so hugely out of proportion to their size. She also managed to do a quick tip of the hat to Ruby On Rails.

And they've been tearing up the blog lately with a ton of great posts. Allow me to direct you to:

The Problem with Preferences: Interface Design and the Customer Experience

The Importance of Having a Designer on Staff

and Apprehension is the Enemy of Interface Design.

* Except for this little tidbit:

Veen has recently put together a small team of developers to create a Ruby on Rails application that the company plans to release to the outside world (the program, a tool to help bloggers measure traffic and other stats on their site, will be out by the end of the year, Veen says).

So that's what Veen has been up to lately! I, like many bloggers, use the free StatCounter for my webstats. It does the job, but it's far from ideal. And I would gladly pay (a little) for a better service, but I haven't been able to find anything targeted at the individual, rather than the corporate, level. I can't wait to see what Jeff's team is going to come up with. My credit card is ready.

UPDATE: Ooh, look — more here.