Comments on: 37 Signals Highrise Released

By: zoli

zoli — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:51:30 +0000

My boss loves it.

By: Chad

Chad — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 23:34:38 +0000

Tried Highrise. It was ok. At my firm we use BaseCamp for most projects, I doubt we will adopt Highrise in its present form…

http://www.ajaxianShouldIDo.com

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:04:55 +0000

Alright Dan, tell me if heap (http://heap.wbpsystems.com/) hurts your eyes.

In all seriousness, I would really appreciate people’s opinions about the whole vCard /CSV thing that I asked Josh about.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:47:13 +0000

Information explosion! Right there on the page. BigContacts hurts my eyes. In future, only plug things that don’t hurt my eyes.

By: Paul Freet

Paul Freet — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 14:36:38 +0000

Highrise looks to be a interesting product. They do seem to have ease of use down, but might be limited by a lack of features.

A true contact manager it is not. Highrise is more of a ‘People Wiki’. They are missing way to many features to make it useful for a sales team or small business.

If I may add a shameless plug, Big Contacts http://www.bigcontacts.com is in an open beta right now, and launching on April 1st. Up to 500 contacts and 3 users for Free. And a complete contact manager functionality. Might be worth looking at/writing about.

By: Jake Ingman

Jake Ingman — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 14:30:51 +0000

@josh
Depending on what program you use to keep your contacts – you should be able to export multiple contacts as a single vCard. I did this from my Address Book and it worked like a charm.

By: DHH

DHH — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:32:21 +0000

Thanks for the write-up. The funny thing about the 25-limit is that most of us at 37signals have been using a personal Highrise account for months in addition to the shared company account. On our personal accounts, we’re all still under the 25-contact limit.

I use Highrise to track conversations with my doctor, lawyer, accountant, mechanic, dentist, a few Rails partners, some journalists, and a few others. All fits well under the 25-contact limit.

The key feature of Highrise is not storing your contact information in the sky (I rarely even bother to fill that out), but rather to track your conversations and tasks with people where tracking matters (ie, not your mates dinner on Friday, but your last repair at the mechanic or that your deliverables for taxes is due next week).

On a technical note, we use multiple asset hosts to get around the connection limit. We don’t use S3 for assets, but we do use it for file uploads.

By: Dan Kubb

Dan Kubb — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:46:25 +0000

Highrise doesn’t use S3, but it is possible to store the files on S3, and use an EC2 host to serve the files via SSL. Keep in mind that bandwidth overage charges through Rackspace are very high compared to Amazon’s rates, so it would make sense for sites with large amounts of static content. I doubt Highrise falls into that category though.

Using S3/EC2 is more of a headache compared to just serving the files through a standard fast front-end server. However most Rails apps are deployed in an nearly fully automated manner, so its not like it’ll cause headaches beyond the inital (relatively easy) setup. If the cost to setup is less than the bandwidth charges then its a no-brainer.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:04:50 +0000

Ohh.. Sorry that response was to Josh, I miss read the comment line.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:03:37 +0000

Dan
Would you prefer CSV? If so would you prefer that in addition to vcard or is vcard unnecessary if you have CSV? The reason I ask is we released a CRM back in december and we are going through our first group of feature additions. Anyhow we are getting a very mixed bag of “I need vCard” and “Don’t put in vcard” in our survey.

By: NICCAI

NICCAI — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:24:31 +0000

Boodie is correct. It is to get around the connection limitation and speed up load times. Here are some links for anyone interested:

http://www.die.net/musings/page_load_time/
http://www.ajaxperformance.com/?p=33

By: rick

rick — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:59:14 +0000

I’m sure an API will be coming soon. The rails community has been spending the last year building awesome rest API support.

By: josh

josh — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:45:26 +0000

this is exactly the service i have been looking for. However, the import features are severely lacking. What If I have a contact DB i need to import?! I don’t want to add people individually by uploading vcards.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:31:38 +0000

I like it

By: boodie

boodie — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:54:20 +0000

@brad
assets1-4 just points to the /public/ on the one server (or in their case probably some load balanced cluster)

So, 4 asset servers, 1 for regular pages – IE: 9 connections at a time, FF: 17 connections (think the default is 4)

if you use firefox, try turning on pipelining and see how insanely fast stuff loads (and also goes crazy and breaks some sites).

http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php

Is a great idea, if you let rails generate all your asset html tags for you.

By: Philip Plante

Philip Plante — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:50:30 +0000

Andy, I think you are wrong about that.

A simple DNS lookup reveals that asset1.highrisehq.com points to 72.3.156.112 – 72.3.156.119 which is used by 37 Signals via RackSpace. Using S3 here would probably cause them more headaches than just running a static asset server.

By: Rob Sanheim

Rob Sanheim — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:45:16 +0000

Normally you would do assest hosting so you either can use a CDN, or have the flexibility to go with a CDN down the road. If you have a strict path of /public/images, it will cause pain down the road when you want to offload images to a CDN to scale.

By: Brad Harris

Brad Harris — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:37:29 +0000

I imagine mapping the assets to different domains is for better load times, to get around the 2 connections per domain limit or w/e it is?

By: boodie

boodie — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:35:01 +0000

>>And the http://asset%.highrisehq.com are
>> no doubt mapped to Amazon S3.

Not necessarily, unless they’ve figured out a way to do virtual hosting with S3 and SSL (or their buddy Jeff gave em a hand).

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 17:53:32 +0000

And the http://asset%.highrisehq.com are no doubt mapped to Amazon S3.