Fluid Scripts for Campfire

Posted by Chad Pytel

Mar 05

Growl when someone says your name, and better behavior in Fluid

At thoughtbot we’re a distributed team: 7 in Boston, 3 in New York City, 1 in Chicago, another in San Francisco, and myself in Philadelphia – we use Campfire constantly for team communication throughout the day. Almost all of us used Pyro to access Campfire, but after upgrading to Leopard things started going downhill – so we started experimenting with Fluid.

We’ve been toying with these scripts for a while with Greasekit, and now that Fluid has been upgraded with built in userscripting, I figure its time to get it out there.

The one feature that we all wanted was some notification when someone said your name in Campfire, so thats the first script I made – we call it Campfire Name Watcher. When the fluid application window doesn’t have focus, and someone says your name (or any word or phrase you provide) Fluid sends a Growl notification. I have mine set to make a sound as well. Just for fun, It’ll also highlight your name.

This works especially well when you enable tabbed browsing in your Fluid Campfire app, and open each Campfire room in a separate tab. Now, not only will you get notified when you’re not in the Fluid app itself, but you’ll get notified when someone in another chat room that you’re currently not paying attention to says your name.

The name watcher script uses cookies to persist your list of things to watch for, so that you don’t need to resupply it every time. The first time you go into Campfire with this script installed, it’ll ask you to provide a comma separated list of things to watch for:

To edit the list of names, right click on the campfire app dock icon and choose Name Watcher.

Opening each room in another window is really nice, as it allows you to quickly switch between rooms, and makes your Campfire Fluid app even more like Pyro. However, the UI gets messy because you have your Fluid tabs as well as the HTML Campfire tabs.

The second script is a bunch of stylesheet and behavior changes to make using Fluid tabs, and Fluid in general with Campfire more useable. Unfortunately, its not possible to script things to open in new tabs in Fluid, so you have to make sure to Apple-Click the links in the Lobby to get new tabs.

The script hides all the HTML tabs:

and moves their functionality into dock menu items:

It also makes other little changes to make it better to use Fluid with campfire, for example, it makes it so that if the input box doesn’t have focus and you begin to type, it’ll move focus to the input box, and it makes it so that search and other function open in new windows.

Get the scripts from:

https://svn.thoughtbot.com/hackfest/campfire/fluid/campfireFluid.user.js https://svn.thoughtbot.com/hackfest/campfire/fluid/campfireNameWatcher.user.js

Get Fluid from here:

http://fluidapp.com

Get a nice icon for it here:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/images/campfire-logo-for-fluid.png

Things in Fluid and userscripting are rough right now, consider it the “wild west” of campfire. Lots of us at thoughtbot are using these scripts and Fluid on a day to day basis now, but we’re definitely not quite there yet in where I’d want the actual functionality and usability of all of this to be. I’d definitely be interested in hearing your thoughts and even getting your patches.

Comments on this post

Kamal Fariz

Mar 06

Kamal Fariz said,

Giant Robots channelling Robby Russel? Almost identical post on the same day about using Campfire, Fluid and GreaseKit

Morgan Roderick

Mar 06

Morgan Roderick said,

You know it’s a good idea, when two different implementations crop up at the same time :-)

Chad Pytel

Mar 06

Chad Pytel said,

I think we both probably had our articles in draft form for some time, because Robby scripting portion is somewhat outdated, and I was waiting to publish mine until the built-in user scripting got to the point where it was useable. (I helped beta-test fluid 0.8).

Anyway, his article is good because it gives a basic overview of Fluid and setup instructions, while the scripts we’ve written are a little more useful, and make Fluid more like using Pyro was.

bryanl

Mar 07

bryanl said,

awesome.

Tim Harper

Mar 10

Tim Harper said,

A lot of people got the impression that robby wrote the campfire growl user script. It’s not the case. He just wrote up an article about how to install it.

“Robby’s” scripting portion is not updated. I’m the one who wrote the script, and it is very up to date. In fact, there are plans to merge my campfire growl script (the one Robby referenced) in with the current version of fluid. The implementation is quite a bit cleaner. Technoweenie has a cloned version of my script as well that does a similar thing (notifying you only when your name pops up)

Thanks for letting me set the record straight,

Tim

Justin French

Mar 10

Justin French said,

Great work! Can Fluid respond to drag events? The one remaining thing from Pyro I still miss at RedBubble is the drag-n-drop file uploader.

Tim Harper

Mar 11

Tim Harper said,

By the way, great work! Your script looks awesome, I really like the menu integration you’ve added.

Tim

Roger

Mar 24

Roger said,

Wow Tim! Your script rocks! I’ll admit I like it, too. Nice work. -R

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