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Download Squad says Campfire is one of the 10 web apps you should be running on your Mac with Fluid. What's Fluid? A Mac app that can pull web applications onto your desktop and turn them into OS X native site-specific browsers.
Campfire, the popular team communication system from 37Signals, works so well with Fluid that 37S has released an official Fluid Icon for Campfire. Some great scripts, including Growl alerts when someone mentions your name in Campfire, can be found at Thoughtbot's blog.
Mashable presents "20+ Mac Apps to Increase Your Productivity." On the list is the Propane/Campfire combo:
Propane ($20) — 37Signals’ Campfire is a great way for groups to communicate. Think of it as an always-on chatroom, with the ability to share files, search through transcripts, create sub-rooms and directly address users. It’s fantastic, and like all 37Signals apps, designed to run in the browser.However, if you are a heavy Campfire user, you know that sometimes the browser option isn’t always best. You’re forced to dedicate a certain size of a window to Campfire, you have to always have a browser window open (which can be bad when installing apps that insist all browsers be closed — I’m looking at you Adobe!), plus if your browser crashes, your Campfire session goes with it and you have to re-login.
For any Mac user who uses Campfire on a daily basis, I highly recommend Propane. More than just a single-site browser, it’s a well designed app that makes searching, adding in files, viewing files and using Campfire a joy. You can set your Growl settings for certain alerts or extended alerts, you can drag and drop images or videos directly from Safari into Propane and adding other files is just as easy.
Jane at Setting Contexts recently published "Interview: Overcommitted on Ember (Campfire for the iPhone)."
Right after I posted my Q&A with Morfunk’s David Kaneda a couple of months ago (I’m still a big Outpost fan!), I received a great outreach email from Overcommitted, telling me about Ember. Ember brings Campfire (the 37signals group chat application) to the iPhone – and fills a huge gap in my own productivity needs. I’ve been using the new version of Ember for about a week (in fact, a lot of the follow-up questions were discussed in Campfire), and I have to say it’s a noticeable improvement over V.1 in speed and feature set.
The interview discusses how the Overcommitted team got started, how they decided on price, the development process, etc.
> How do you guys use Campfire and why was that the app you wanted to focus on first?None of us live in the same city and rarely get the chance to work together face to face. Campfire has been invaluable for helping us keep in touch across time zones and work schedules. We use it to discuss iterations for the various apps we’re working on, show sketches and talk through code. We developed Ember first because we knew we could get immediate use for it and felt other iPhone development teams could benefit.
Ember works on iPhones/iPod Touches running version 3.0 software or above and is available on the iTunes AppStore here.
Sparkflare is a new Extra that pipes tweets and web feeds into a Campfire room. This blog post explains why the team over at FuriousToast created it:
We built Sparkflare because, while we use many tools every day, we live in Campfire.
- We write and commit code to GitHub.
- We check Twitter (Who's writing about us and our products? What are they saying? What about our competitors?).
- We monitor GetSatisfaction.
- We log product issues.
- We blog.
- We tweet.
Our team lives in Campfire and we want all of this information to come to us. We wrote Sparkflare to make this happen — for us, and for you.
We use it, we love it, and (if your team uses Campfire) we think you will too. Go sign up now!
Campfire works with a variety of third-party customer service applications, iPhone, Windows and Mac OS X desktop programs, widgets and more. Now there's an Extras and Add-ons page at the Campfire site where you can see all of them in one place.
Software developers can create extras and add-ons with Tinder, the unofficial Campfire API.
Ember is a native Campfire application for the iPhone that features "a streamlined user interface for mobile chatting, live image previews right within the chat room, inline viewing of popular file formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), inline YouTube viewing, access to all your Campfire rooms, and full SSL support."
Ember was created by Ovecommitted and is not an official 37signals product. It's available for $9.99 in the App Store.
Attention developers: There's a newly released Campfire to Jabber interface. This is a simple script that will forward messages from a Campfire room to a Jabber account, and vice versa. (Jabber is an open instant messaging technology that anyone can use.) It uses Tinder, the unofficial Campfire API, and xmpp4r-simple, a Jabber client library. You can run it on your own server or local machine.
With a clean interface, smart drag-and-drop, custom notifications and more, Propane makes Campfire a joy to use on Mac OS 10.5.
