37signals Product Blog

Updates for 37signals' Draft, Highrise, and Campfire apps are now available in the App store

New updates for 37signals' Draft app, Highrise app, and Campfire app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad are all now available in the App store. These updates fix bugs, add interface polish, and increase speed. More details:

Draft 1.2.1
* Fix crash with very long continuous sketches.

Highrise 1.0.4
* Notes and emails can be selected for copy/paste.
* Always connects to Highrise using SSL.
* Fixed blank dashboard issue.
* Fixed time zone issues.

Campfire 1.0.1
* Fix transcript browsing issues.
* Allow rejoining a full room.
* Speedups and bug fixes.

Apps that bring Campfire to your iPad

Sparks
Sparks is a third-party Campfire client for iPad. Macworld tried it out and liked it.

You can add multiple “campsites” (rooms, or Campfire accounts), tap users to automatically fill their name for a reply or compose an in-app e-mail, upload images from from the Photos app, and specify keyword alerts for any room. Sparks can also check Gravatar, a "globally recognized avatar" service for Websites, blogs, and other Internet hangouts, to display icons for each of the room’s chatters—something Campfire itself doesn’t even do.

I tested Sparks in our Macworld Campfire room as I wrote this post, and I’m impressed. This by no means counts as a Macworld review, but Sparks so far seems well designed, fast, and has plenty of polish and clever features that make Campfire feel at home on the iPad.

The app costs $8.

Torch
Torch is another native iPad app that allows you to chat in Campfire with an iPad. The developer's site shows how the interface is designed specifically for the iPad.

You can enter text at the top of the screen so it doesn’t move when keyboard pops up.

AppAdvice previewed Torch before its release:

Composed messages can have special sounds added to them in order to drive a point home. The usual Campfire “ping” sound is played when someone else sends a message, so you know when the app needs your attention. You can view what room you are currently in and who is in the room via buttons placed at the top of the screen. And finally, past conversations can be sorted and viewed by date.

The app costs $9.99.

Pyre
Pyre is one more Campfire client for iPad. It supports monitoring multiple rooms.

Pyre costs $4.99.

Related: The Campfire Extras page

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.

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:

Campfire API now available

Attention developers: Campfire now has an official API (Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise also have APIs). You can share thoughts, ask questions, and help fellow developers on the 37signals-api mailing list.

Download Squad recommends running Campfire with Fluid on your Mac

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.

v1.01 of Propane released (app for using Campfire on Macs)

v1.01 of Propane, the wonderful Campfire app for the Mac, is out.

With a clean interface, smart drag-and-drop, custom notifications and more, Propane makes Campfire a joy to use on Mac OS 10.5.

View screencast or download at PropaneApp.com.

Mashable lists Propane/Campfire as top Mac productivity apps

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.

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.