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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.
What do you do when there are lots of people in a Campfire chat room and you want to direct a question or answer to a specific person? Simply start your message with the “@” sign and the first few characters of that person’s name until a yellow box displays showing that person’s full name. Send your message and that person’s full name will display in front of your statement in the chat room.
Note: This may not work if you are using a 3rd party application to access Campfire chat.
Check it out: MacAppStorm has posted a great piece on "The Ultimate Collection of 37signals Mac & iPhone Apps." It offers summaries and reviews of over 25 Mac and iPhone apps designed to work alongside Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise.
Keep things light with sound effects in Campfire. Type “/play crickets”, “/play rimshot”, or “/play trombone” and share a sound "message" with your group.
Note: This may not work if you are using a 3rd party application to access Campfire.
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.
A new version of Tinder, an API for interfacing with Campfire, has been released. If you’re using Tinder and you've been noticing flakiness, upgrade to the new version.
We just released an update to Campfire that we have internally called the "hospitality" feature. Before today, it was possible that you could type messages into a Campfire chat only to later discover that your Internet connection was acting up and the messages didn't send. Campfire never gave a clue that your Internet connection was spotty, so missing messages or miscommunication could result.
We thought Campfire should be a better host than that, so we built a new feature to keep track of any messages that didn't send. If for some reason your messages, pastes or images don't send correctly, Campfire will now try again another time. If Campfire still can't send your message, it will show a red notice below your message to notify you that the message wasn't sent. This helps to make sure nobody miscommunicates or misses out in the event of a troublesome Internet connection.
We hope this update makes Campfire just a little more hospitable in those disconnected moments. Please enjoy the update and thanks for your continued support.
ReadWriteEnterprise recently published "The Four Essential Apps for Distributed Teams." It's a list of the four types of applications you'll need for groups who work from geographically separate locations — and some examples of the popular places to get them.
One type of tool you'll need according to RWE: IM & Chat. And Campfire "can't be beat."
Group chat is slightly less common a need than IM, and is less useful for informal access in your daily workflows. But for certain use cases, only group chat will do. Skype and Campfire from 37Signals can't be beat from our perspective...
Another recommended type of tool: Task Tracking. Basecamp makes that list.
By task tracking, we mean any tool that exists to keep track of the group's work. These can be issue trackers like JIRA, Trac, or Redmine. For those less-development oriented, it might be something tailored only to project management, like Basecamp, LiquidPlanner, or the offerings from Microsoft and Oracle.
With a clean interface, smart drag-and-drop, custom notifications and more, Propane makes Campfire a joy to use on Mac OS 10.5.
