Butane for Campfire

A few weeks ago, I installed a new Campfire client for iPhone called Butane, and I have been using the app ever since. It isn’t the perfect Campfire client for iPhone, but it’s the best one I’ve used to date.

I’ve always been surprised by the lack of great Campfire clients for iOS. We use 37signals’ Campfire as the main communication channel for our team here at MacStories; we tried many web-based group chat tools over the years, but we keep coming back to Campfire because of its simple design, stable web app, and features like Twitter integration and inline attachments. However, I am no fan of the official Campfire application – which is very basic and sometimes fails to load the latest messages in our room – or Sparks, a popular third-party alternative. Sparks sports a lot of functionalities and it also runs on the iPad, but I find its interface and navigation kind of clunky in some areas, and, like the official app, it often hangs on sending new messages and isn’t generally reliable.

Butane sits in between the official client and Sparks. It’s got a clean design, and it supports direct links to tweet with embedded previews, inline attachments, and sound effects. Furthermore, it implements a Facebook-like panel navigation to see a room’s transcripts and files, search, and people currently online. The main screen of the app – the Lobby – displays all your available rooms, and it’s got Settings to enable sound and vibration, as well as “notification words” for specific keywords. Overall, the design of Butane is clean, messages are sent quickly even over 3G, and you can upload photos to a room directly from your iPhone.

Butane doesn’t support push notifications – this may be related to the Campfire API – nor does it have an iPad version, which I’d love to use. Instead, right now I’m using the Campfire website on the iPad’s Safari – it works, but it’s not an optimal solution.

Looking forward to future improvements, Butane is $3.99 on the App Store.