Fuel for Campfire
Campfire is a web-based group chat tool from 37signals. It’s like Instant Messaging but for groups. At Swirrl we use it for customer support.
Initially, I just ran Campfire in Firefox, but the browser isn’t really the best place for an application that we depend on so heavily, especially as we also have a couple of other, private, Campfire rooms that we use internally. The Campfire tabs would sometimes get accidentally closed, or I’d forget to start them back up again if the browser crashed.
For the past year or so, I’ve been using Fluid to overcome some of these problems. Despite some cunning scripts from people like Tim Harper, I still wasn’t totally happy with the experience.
In the last few months, I’ve been trying Propane, which enhances Campfire for OSX. It looks smart, it lets you drag and drop files into chats, and you can set up custom growl notifications (to alert you when someone enters a specific room, posts a message, or mentions a certain phrase, etc). Propane is free for a month, and then you have to pay (a very reasonable) $20 for a license.
