Announcing: Flare 0.4
Download: http://mattbrindley.com/flare/flare.msi (.msi, 2MB)
Forum Support: http://mattbrindley.com/support/
Chat Support: Matt Brindley | Public Room
Want a site-specific browser for your web app? Contact me to find out more or chat to me in my Campfire room: Matt Brindley | Public Room
You can now download Flare 0.4 - the first self-updating, stable release of Flare, the site-specific browser for 37signals' Campfire web app.
Flare lets you stay logged into a room in your Campfire account and notifies you of any new messages.
Features
- Stay logged into your favourite Campfire room in the background - even between reboots.
- Quickly switch between open rooms using Ctrl + the room number
- Be notified of new messages with a preview.
- Tray icon changes colour to show new messages have arrived (in case you miss the preview)
- Request your password through the app if you've lost it.
- Run multiple copies of Flare keeping you logged into many different rooms at once.
Instructions
- Make sure you've got .Net 2 installed, if not, get it here
- Click here to download and install Flare (.msi, 2MB)
It's been tested on Windows XP Home, Pro, Server 2003 and Vista.
How to use Flare
- After installation completes visit Start > All Programs > Flare
- If you've not used Flare before it will ask you for your account name, username and password.
- Once Flare has logged into your account you'll see your campfire lobby, enter the room you want to and minimise the window. Flare will keep you logged into this room until you leave it.
- When new messages, pastes, files or users arrive you'll be notified with a semi-transparent message preview.
- If you miss the preview, don't worry - Flare's icon will glow orange until you next view the window.
Update: SSL support has now been added. If your account uses SSL, make sure you check the "Use SSL" checkbox when entering your account name, username and password.
Update: If you've been using "CampfireWin" please follow these instructions to upgrade to Flare
Update: I've released Flare under the GNU GPL. More details at: http://flarenow.com/
Comments
September 22, 2006 4:21 AM
Sweet! Thanks Matt!
September 22, 2006 12:15 PM
This is very very nice!
September 22, 2006 12:49 PM
Sweet! Only comment I'd have -- any chance of it using the default browser for pasted code / search results instead of reverting back to IE?
September 22, 2006 1:15 PM
Hi Oliver - that's something I'm working on now. It's always been an issue but I think I may have a solution to try out in the next few days.
It is an important one though.
Thanks for everyone's nice comments!
September 22, 2006 2:52 PM
Matt:
Does this app work with IE7? I've been having some rendering issues with Campfire inside IE7 where the rooms list across the top and the text entry box at the bottom are offset to the far right of the page.
-Aaron
September 22, 2006 3:18 PM
Hi Aaron
37signals don't support IE7 yet in their products.
They announced a little while ago it would be supported by the time it launches (it's only RC1 at the moment I believe).
You're right, the rendering is a little off.
The good news is I'll be moving the rendering from MSHTML to the Gecko soon - so it will use a fixed version of Firefox.
At the moment Flare uses whatever version of Internet Explorer you have installed.
Although I have IE7 installed and it's still very usable, I find the textbox is a little far to the right, but other than that it's ok.
September 22, 2006 3:26 PM
Thanks for the quick response Matt. No big deal to me, but I'm glad to know the problem isn't on my end. Thanks for the great app!
September 22, 2006 4:13 PM
awesome great work!!
September 22, 2006 10:36 PM
One thing. . . the installer uses the same path as the SWF Decompiler named Flare. I had to rename the old product's folder to install yours. Great work on the app! Thanks.
September 23, 2006 5:00 AM
jf, you are living proof that the "Install Location" step on Windows Installer isn't pointless :-)
I'll add it to Flare's installer so users can change the install path if they need to.
Either that or I could add a company name:
<Program Files>\Matt Brindley\Flare\flare.exe
The only issue with that is it might take a while to find it (if you ever need to find the app folder) as you probably won't remember my name.
Hmmm... I do prefer the convention over config, in this case not having an additional step - I put a lot of thought into the installer and I love the way it just starts (after all, I clicked to install it, why do I need to say 'start' again?, imagine if every app you opened asked you to confirm opening it?).
I'll give it some thought - thanks for the feedback!
September 25, 2006 2:32 AM
Great application. thanks
September 25, 2006 9:10 PM
i've been using flare for just about a week I have got to say it's a champ! I've gotten 2 people who couldn't stand using campfire in a web browser converted.
What about doing something similar for backpack?
September 26, 2006 3:25 AM
Wayne - Thanks!
Jonezy - Glad it's helped you. An SSB for Backpack would be cool, I'm not sure how many people would use it but I'll certainly look into it. Thanks again for the feedback!
September 26, 2006 8:30 PM
well i built a stand alone browser for backpack but it's just a a winform with the ie activex control embedded in it which is pretty sucky :/
September 26, 2006 8:59 PM
Jonezy - Cool! I'd say the next things to do would be
1. Implement minimise to tray, with double-clicking to bring it back (I think Nick Bradbury has the best implementation of this in FeedDemon.
2. Make it log you in automatically when logging onto the machine. This is very useful, especially if it's minimised to the tray.
3. I thought a cool idea for a Backpack SSB would be to automatically download known and acceptable files types (like pdf, gif, jpg, png, htm etc - but not exe, bat, mdb...) from the files section. And then open them from the context menu for the tray icon. So I could right click on the icon go to "Salted" > "Projects" > "SomeProject" > "Files" > "SomeFile" > "Version 3" and it would open immediately.
September 27, 2006 12:33 PM
yeah matt, the other thing that i would love to see is offline capabilities... I would love to be able to use it as an offline organizer as well
October 9, 2006 5:33 AM
Finally! Exactly what I have been needing all along.
May 17, 2007 2:53 PM
another cool thing to add would be for users in the room to set their status (away, at lunch, etc). then have this client keep track of and display statuses; since there is this client-based component you can set a person to away if they are not typing on their computer for X minutes, etc.
June 29, 2007 3:32 PM
It would be nice if Flare supported multiple campfire logins at the same time (like Pyro).
Crossing my fingers...
July 10, 2007 3:31 PM
Excellent work, so much more usable than within the browser :)
Couple of feature requests to make my life even easier:
1) Other IM clients can be minimised by hitting Esc at anytime, it would be cool if Flare could do this too.
2) Its annoyingly easy to close the window (using the windows X button) absent mindedly. Any chance this can minimise to tray rather than close?
September 20, 2007 7:29 PM
Thanks Matt. Flare is proving to be helpful. I finally dumped Trillian and I am just running Campfire.
Spell check and Links to default browser would be helpful.
R.
October 15, 2007 1:45 AM
Hey. This is a nice app, but is there a way to make it so that it doesn't have to "install" itself each time I start the application (I'm using Windows Vista). Each time I open Flare, Windows Installer pops up and configures the program. It has to look for the installer msi and if it can't find it, Flare won't start. Then the AutoUpdateStarter.exe comes up and asks me to Allow/Cancel. Is there a way to just make it so that when I double click on Flare, the Flare window opens without all this stuff?
Thanks.
November 21, 2007 10:18 PM
How much memory does this take up? Most of our development teams run Firefox, a couple screens, etc and just keep two or three campfire sessions up with the remote teams, marketing, etc - in FF it's just a couple tabs.
I noticed in running the previous version of flare that a 30-40mb process was launched just to have CF up... Seems a little much - I guess that was just the IE browser in the background?
December 21, 2007 11:39 AM
haven't seen any activity here in a while. and your forum has been down for a while too. you done with this? if so, how about sharing the code - nice tool but needs a few extra things (like nudges w/sound). thanks.
December 23, 2007 12:58 AM
Hi David,
Flare is open source, you'll find the code at: http://code.google.com/p/flare-browser
I'm sorry about the forum, I know it's not ideal, but I'm in the process of moving to host my site, blog and forum away from MT and Vanilla, to a Rails app, built by Jesse from HogBaySoftware - I've been working on it to help get it ready and it's fantastic, just what I need. MovableType and Vanilla just don't do what I want anymore.
I'll be announcing it all very shortly - along with some exciting news about some of my products :-)
January 27, 2008 9:13 PM
Seems the default browser feature is bugging or broken in flare. It opens iE every time, but i have FireFox as a default browser.