I feel like I'm posting a lot about 37 Signals lately, but Jason kicked up a minor (but highly interesting) controversy yesterday.
He posted about one of the common Basecamp feature requests that they have chosen not to implement, and tried to explain why. (Be sure to scroll down and read Jason's comment as well as the original post.)
Jason argues that despite many requests to the contrary, one should not be able to assign a task in Basecamp to multiple people because, "The more people you make responsible for something, the less chance there is for it to get done." Commenters immediately snapped back, calling 37 Signals arrogant, naive, unresponsive and foolish. "How dare you tell us how we should work!" they cried.
First of all, I strongly agree with Jason. We used to follow the multiple-asignee practice at my day job, but my team decided not to allow it, much to our benefit. (That was one of the compelling reasons that we decided to get a new, better bug-tracker — one that worked the way we wanted to work, and that agreed with our ideas about software development practices.)
And today, David from 37 Signals backed Jason up with some really insightful comments.
Neither Basecamp nor Rails is trying to be all things to all people. Because you can't. And once you realize that, it becomes a lot easier to embed opinions in your software. They're going to be there anyway. Kind of like the notion of "objective journalism", the bias can never be rooted out.
I firmly agree with DHH here: bias is inevitable in software (and in most things). I've heard plenty of sales pitches where the presenter promises that his tool will, "adapt to work the way you do." Unfortunately, I don't believe that for a second. All software is built with the assumptions and biases of it's designers. They either did a good job with those decisions or they didn't. And you, as a user, are left to either work with the tool, or work against it.
Shopgirl is based on the well-respected book by Steve Martin — one that multiple people have told me I would love. And Martin wrote the screenplay as well, so it's less likely to have been butchered. However, this is one case where I'm not going to read the book before I see the film.
It has Jason Schwartzman, who after a long period in the quirky-supporting-actor wilderness seems to be returning to his Rushmore roots. He has some really funny lines in the trailer. I fully expect to love his character.
It also has Claire Danes, looking and sounding like a grown-up version of Angela Chase. No more blonde hair, no more stupid Mod-Squad / Terminator 3 action-movie diversions. And she wears nerdy glasses.
I'm sure poor Ms. Danes just cringed. No doubt, she bleached her hair blonde and took those ridiculous action-movie roles exactly so that she could move beyond Angela Chase. And I'll bet she's dreading the inevitable comparisons that will be drawn by ill-informed reviewers between that character and this simply because of her haircut. She's been trying for ten years to shake that role, practically her first. But hey — you can't help who you fall in love with.
And while we're dissecting the trailer, you should note that it has Death Cab and The Notwist playing on in the background. It's as if this movie has been developed expressly for me or, at least, the slightly nostalgic, mid-nineties-alterna-teen, Wes-Anderson-loving, indie-rock demographic which I represent.
Click through to find out.
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.
My family has been in town for the last few days, experiencing the meteorological perfection that is Santa Barbara. So while I've been having a lovely time with them for the last few days, there hasn't been much time to write. I hope to remedy that next week after they return to the sweltering South. 'Til then.
As you may have heard, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp bought the social networking service MySpace (about which I wrote here) for $580 million dollars. Internet pundits have been trying to explain the move (or, at least, the price tag) ever since.
I wanted to point out this analysis of the MySpace purchase from Robert Young (guesting for Om Malik). He makes a fairly compelling case that Murdoch's has MTV in his sites.
At my day job, each of the engineers is responsible for giving a technical presentation a couple times a year. We can talk about pretty much anything we want, though the more relevant it is, the better. My presentation slot came up Monday, and I decided to give a demo of Ruby On Rails.
We're developing a J2EE app with a great deal of legacy code on the database, so I didn't score very highly on the relevance category. But I focused on the cool features that Rails has to make development easy, with the hope that we might learn some principles that we can incorporate into our own development.
I started with the same basic steps that DHH shows in his 15-min Rails movie. But I diverged from his script about half way through and instead spent a lot of time on the testing framework and how that makes development easier and more XP-like.
The presentation went over really well — people seemed interested and excited. Not that we'll ever be able to use it at work, but it's good for us to hear what the rest of the developer community is excited about.
My colleague David got to go to OSCON this week. I've been talking to him on the phone each day to find out what I've been missing. It sounds like a lot — I'm really starting to wish I had gone.
On Monday, David got to hear a tutorial on Ruby (given by Dave Thomas) and another on Rails (given by DHH). He reports that both were solid, though geared to the mostly newbie crowd. However, he got to quiz DHH for a bit after the talk and got some really good answers to many of the problems we've been struggling with.
And on Tuesday night, David Heinemeier Hannson won the award for hacker-of-the-year from the conference folks. The award is well-derseved. DHH has managed to create a phenomenon.
David also had the amazing good luck to hear both Paul Graham and Larry Wall speak. Paul Graham gave a talk on "What Business Can Learn from Open Source." Larry Wall gave his yearly State of the Onion address, but I can't find it online anywhere yet. However, both are talented writers, and equally entertaining speakers, I'm sure. I hope someday I'll have the chance to hear them both.
Note: I wrote this ages ago, but never managed to post it: every time I started to, I ended up rewriting and adding and expanding, never quite finishing. But seeing as how the movie has been out for over a month now and it probably gone from most theaters, I'm just gonna put it up as is. I apologize in advance for the rather poor organization and some half-finished thoughts.
As I mentioned last week, I finally got around to seeing Batman Begins. It was a nearly perfect film — exactly what I wanted out of a Batman movie. But a warning before we go further: I should point out that I really like Batman. I've read a most of the seminal storylines in the comics. I watched the Adam West version as a kid. I've seen all the movies. I've read a few books on the history of the character. I've seen all of the animated versions. And I have a whole raft of thoughts and emotions and opinions about this movie. So if comics aren't your bag, please: give up now: this is going to be long. Also, there are mild spoilers below, so if you do like Batman but you haven't seen the new movie yet — stop reading and get to a theater.
Thanks to a timely alert by DealMac, I placed an order for two new flat-panel monitors on Tuesday. They arrived today (with free shipping, no less).
Of course, I would have preferred an Apple Cinema Display, but at ~$500 difference per monitor, I couldn't remotely justify the cost. It's not a direct comparison, since the Apple's closest monitor is a 20" widescreen, but two 19" are bigger than a single 20" widescreen (2560×1024 vs. 1680×1050) and cheaper, too.
Now I need to check and see if I need a new video card. This one looks nice.
Also, I now have two 19" Dell (Sony) Trinitron flat-screen (not flat panel) monitors (like these) in good condition that I need to get rid of. Anyone want 'em?
Jonathan Nolen 