Interview with developers of Ember (Campfire for the iPhone)

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.

"Run your home more like a business" with 37signals tools

101 Tools to Run Your Home More Like a Business:

Home life seems to get more and more complicated as days go by. There are chores, paperwork, and lots of maintenance to deal with, but your home doesn’t have to take over your life. By using tools that streamline the work of businesses, you’ll find that it’s easy to get things done. Read on and you’ll find 101 tools that will make your home run like a business.

Included on the list: Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, and Writeboard.

Twitter engineers use Campfire to communicate

Apple profiles Twitter and along the way mentions the engineering team there uses Campfire to communicate.

When software engineering teams work in multiple group chats, they use Campfire, a web-based group chat service for the Mac and iPhone.

Sparkflare pipes tweets and web feeds into Campfire

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!

Try Sparkflare
See more Campfire Extras

Ember 1.1 is now available (at a discounted price for the next week)

Ember 1.1 is now available in the iPhone app store. If you're not familiar...

Ember is a group chat client that allows you to use Campfire™ by 37signals® anywhere you go. Now in a native iPhone app you can chat effortlessly with groups large and small.

It includes the following new features:

• Take and upload photos directly into Campfire using the iPhone's built in Camera
• Room info screen: you can now see participants names and room topic (editable within Ember)
• Individual room preference for message notifications

To celebrate this release, the Ember team is dropping the price from $9.99 to $5.99 for the next week. Download it from the app store.

Campfire Extras and Add-ons page

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: Campfire for your iPhone

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.

A Campfire to Jabber interface

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.

[Case study] BootStudio uses 37signals tools to build websites for large organizations in Central America

Jorge Arango of BootStudio writes in about his team's use of 37signals products:

About our company

BootStudio creates and manages engaging websites for large organizations in Central America (and beyond). We have a passion for simple, eloquent, standards-based interfaces that get the job done with a minimal amount of fuss. We've been around since 1995, when Internet access was starting to become commercially available in this region, so ours was one of the first web design firms in this part of the world.

The 37signals products we use, and why we like them

Ours is an (almost) entirely web-based business. We manage our day-to-day work on the 37signals suite (along with Google Apps and a few other web-based apps):

• Basecamp is our main project management space; it's where we share files, project notes, deadlines, pending tasks, checklists, etc. We love that all members of each project team—including clients—can have access to the latest information at any time, from anywhere.

• Highrise is where we manage everything "meta" about the company: contract negotiation, business development, human resources issues, etc. Most of these threads are centered on people, so Highrise makes an excellent control center and filing cabinet for these activities.

• Backpack is our intranet. It's where we update each other on our availability ("working remotely this afternoon"), document processes, and interesting news and developments about our industry.

• We also use Campfire as a replacement for IM, although much of our use of this app been overtaken by Backpack's Journal feature.

Last but certainly not least,

• Getting Real has been influential in the way we think about our work. Central America is a "developing market": a euphemism that means that expectations are high, and budgets low. We've had to learn to be nimble and efficient, and the Getting Real ethos has inspired and influenced us.

We like that the 37signals applications have consistent, elegant interfaces; it's been very easy for us to get new team members up-to-speed. The apps also have a well-considered feature set that strikes a smart balance between power with usability. For example, while Backpack isn't as flexible as Google Sites (which we evaluated, given we'd paid for it as part of Google Apps), the former provides the features we need without the complexity that comes with the richer feature set of the latter. We've found that with a bit of ingenuity we can do pretty much anything with these tools. (The one thing we haven't been able to work around is that the app UIs are presented exclusively in English. While this hasn't been too much of a problem for our clients, we can see it becoming more of an issue as we start doing more business with folks in other Spanish-speaking regions.)

A "Virtual Office Kinda Life" with 37signals tools

The author of Setting Contexts has published a couple of posts about using 37signals products:

How Backpack is Saving My Sanity talks about using the entire suite of 37signals tools:

For the first time in a few months I feel like I’m more in control - not just organized, but working with my teams more efficiently. And my teams have been very supportive in trying these tools out and participating. While I don’t have the ability to block off time each day to get work done (too many meetings - grrr) without interruption, I can track what needs to be done and get things done before and after the “workday”.

Living a Virtual Office Kinda Life talks about the web-based tools the author uses at work to stay organized and keep in touch. Among the list:

Basecamp - we use it for project management and have just started to share with our clients. It took a full day to reorganize the existing account when I started - I also put together a couple of screencasts for our team to learn how to use it. I’m also planning to do a couple for our clients so that they feel comfortable using it.

Backpack - we use this as our own intranet. Anything internal (not project-based) goes here. This has been really successful in terms of adoption - everyone has been adding to pages as well as adding their own.

Highrise - we’re using this for our CRM solution and to track our new business process. As of right now, only the crayonistas involved with new business have access.

Read the rest of Living a Virtual Office Kinda Life to see the other tools listed (Twitter, iPhones, etc.).