Campfire picked as one of 40 useful tools for health administrators

This list of the 40 most useful Web apps for health administrators lists "the tools, communication devices, collaborative tricks, productivity and travel apps that can help you shave time off that busy day." Campfire is one of the Communication picks.

Browser trouble? We can help!

If you're not seeing what you expect in one of our applications, we've created this "browser trouble" page that should get you back on track.

The page explains the following fixes:

• Empty your browser's cache
• Remove stale cookies
• Make sure your browser is up-to-date
• Check your internet connection

Introducing Campfire for iPhone

A year or so ago the folks at Overcommitted introduced Ember, an excellent native iPhone app for Campfire. Ember let you chat, view transcripts, jump between rooms, share pictures in a Campfire chat. It was beautifully done. It caught our eye.

Earlier this year we started talking to them about buying Ember. They were into the idea. We worked out a deal, made a few changes to the app, submitted to the App Store. Yesterday Ember officially became 37signals Campfire for iPhone (iTunes App Store link).

As an added bonus, we've dropped the price from $9.99 to $0.00. Campfire for iPhone is free (Ember was priced at $9.99).

If you use Campfire, and you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (not optimized for iPad, but it works in the standard app mode), head over to the App Store and download 37signals Campfire for iPhone today. We use it every day. We hope you find it as useful as we do.

Thanks again for using Campfire.

Launch: Draft for iPad

Draft, our first app for the iPad, is now available in the App Store. Draft is a straightforward, basic sketch app for the iPad with email and Campfire sharing built in. In the App Store, it's currently in the top 100 best-selling category and top 50 highest-grossing.

The backstory

When we design interfaces, we start on paper with a really rough sketch (usually with a Sharpie). The low resolution, thick-point sharpie forces us to focus on big picture ideas — the lines — instead of all the little details that just don't matter yet.

However, when we sketch something on paper, there's a three step process to share it with the rest of the team. First, we sketch. Then we scan. Then we either email or upload to Campfire. And since we often use huge pieces of paper, scanning is a bit of a hassle. There's just too much overhead to share a quick sketch.

So when the iPad came out we knew we had to make a very simple sketch app that mimicked our paper and a sharpie process, but improved on the sharing part. That's where Draft comes in.

Draft makes it very easy to quickly sketch a concept in broad strokes and share it via email or Campfire. It only comes in black with red and white ink. There's only one pen weight meant to emulate a standard sharpie. Draft is a "just draw and share the damn thing quickly" tool. It's not for fine art, it's not for tinkering with colors or weights. It's the quickest way we know how to share a quick visual idea with the rest of our crew no matter where they are.

Campfire integration makes it extra special

We work in Campfire all day long. It's where we share, show, debate, and create. And it's the place where most of our first drafts — our sketches — show up.

So we wanted to make sure Draft made sharing a sketch in Campfire dead simple. You draw something, click the "Share" button, you see a list of your Campfire rooms, you pick one, and a few seconds later it shows up right in the room. Now everyone else in the room can see what you drew.

It's yours for $9.99

Draft is priced at $9.99. You can get it in the App Store today. We hope you find it useful.

Use Notifire to get an IM or text message whenever someone enters a Campfire room

Notifire is a small add-on to Campfire.

Quickly set up a robot that watches your room, and get a normal Instant Message or text message when someone enters. It's the easiest way to add chat support to your website.

How the engineering department at ShermansTravel Media uses Campfire to communicate

ShermansTravel Media is a two-part organization. It aggregates and syndicates travel deals and content, and also has a luxury travel magazine. Eric Lubow, Email Systems Administrator at ShermansTravel, talks about how the company uses Campfire below.

Why do you need Campfire?
Currently our engineering department is the only department in the company that uses Campfire.  Other parts of our business use Basecamp, but the engineering team primarily uses Campfire to communicate.  We do this because we have a team of 8 individuals that work out of 3 or more separate physical locations.  One of those individuals works out of Manchester, UK while the rest of us share the US east coast time zone.

How do you use the product and why do you like it?
It is now part of everyone's routine that when they sit down at their computer, they login to Campfire to start their day.  Campfire allows us to communicate without being intrusive.  IM can be excessively intrusive and distracting at times because it is an "in your face" method of getting someone's attention and involving them in a conversation.  Campfire also has the added ability of letting the QA folks send a quick screenshot to the group if something doesn't seem right.  It's also useful for sharing files that wouldn't normally be shared via Google Docs or Basecamp.

Which features do you use most?
The Campfire API (less the API and more straight Ruby code) allows our application to interact with us.  When our syndication feeds go stale on a particular host, we have a cronjob send an image of Frodo from Lord of the Rings into our channel telling us to fix the feeds.  Every time someone commits to the subversion repository, a commit hook is fired off and the commit message along with the file names that were updated are put into the chat for everyone to see. We also make use of the '@' autocomplete syntax because we have multiple Matt's who are in the chat room.


Most of us use Mac and have additionally "hooked up" Campfire to growl so we are notified when someone is either talking about us or talking about something we need to know about. We use some of the Greasemonkey scripts that have been written to interface with Campfire.

(Click for larger version.) A screenshot of ShermansTravel's Campfire instance with a few Nagios alerts. Learn more about this Nagios notify-by-Campfire Plugin.

What did you use before and why did you switch? 
The sad fact is that we used a combination of IM, Trac, and Basecamp.  They are all great fits for their purpose in their own right, but didn't meet our needs for unintrusive on the spot communication.

Tell us a story about a project or situation where the product helped you out.
We recently cut over ISPs and in order to achieve this, we needed everyone in the same place at the same time.  We could have had a conference call, but that call would have involved nearly 15 people all with their own issues all fighting to get a word in. So we went with Campfire and opened it up publicly.  We had our internal 8 team members there along with representation from our new ISP and our database managed service providers.

Everyone was working from a different location and if someone needed to talk to someone else verbally, everyone had everyone else's cell phones, Skype names, and we always had the fallback Campfire conference line provided.  None of that was needed, we were able to work it all out via the Campfire chat.

Any tips or tricks for other customers?
Look into available Greasemonkey scripts.  The user autocomplete and the Growl interaction makes the use of Campfire even easier.  Most of the engineers use Fluid.App for Mac for the Greasemonkey scripts.  The idea is to keep it in a window separate from your default browser because your browser has a tendency to crash.


Anything else?
As with any engineering department in a small business, we are working on an average of no less than 5 - 10 projects at once. Campfire allows multiple discussions to happen simultaneously and all participants to see things that may be more pertinent to them at another time.

SEO pro recommends software for your small business

Kristoffer Sandven, a professional Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), wrote a piece recommending software for your small business. Three 37signals tools make the list:

Basecamp:

After using it for a while I can’t believe I managed without it. Keeping everything in one place is invaluable. The software keeps track of emails, to-dos, milestones and writeboards (notes), as well as files (documents, pictures, screen shots etc) and makes it available for all participants. I find the messages function especially useful. You can enter a message and notify participants by email. They can then comment on the message directly by email by replying to the notification. Very neat.

Highrise:

Highrise does exactly what I need in a very nice interface. Keep track of contacts and leads, deals and todos in one place. Love the email to Highrise functions. I can forward emails to a special dropbox email address to add new contacts or add emails to the history of a contact. I can do the same to add tasks, even assign them to be done today, tomorrow, later etc.

Campfire:

Campfire is a web-based group chat tool that lets you set up password-protected chat rooms in just seconds. Using the software you can Invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. You can also link to a room on your intranet for internal communications. Campfire is elegant, easy, and web-based. You don’t need to download, install, or configure anything. Just like the other 37signals applications it is iPhone compatible too.

Read the full piece for more of Sandven's suggestions.

See what we're working on at the 37signals change history page

We're constantly working "under the hood" of our apps to improve them. Now you can follow along and see a list of all the latest changes/tweaks/additions at the 37signals change history page (you can also follow these changes at Twitter.com/37changes).

If you just want to see changes for one specific product, there are also individual change history pages: Backpack change history, Basecamp change history, Campfire change history, and Highrise change history.

New in Campfire: Drag and drop uploading

Use Campfire with either Safari, Firefox, or Chrome? Then you're going to like this.

Now you can drag a file from your desktop right into your Campfire room and the file will automatically be uploaded to the room. You don't need to click "Upload a file" in the sidebar and go through that process anymore. Just drag a file right into your browser window and up it goes.

Note: This only works with Safari 3+, Firefox 3.5+, and Chrome.

Latest Propane update lets you use new Campfire conference calling feature

Conference calling was just added to Campfire. If you use Campfire with Propane (a Mac download that lets you run Campfire as a standalone app), you can now upgrade Propane and start making conference calls.

Just update Propane:

And then select Create Conference Call from the Room pulldown menu at the top of the screen: