Furnace

The furnace is a special block currently only available in the indev and infdev versions of Minecraft. Before the furnace appeared, smelting was accomplished by creating a fire and dropping the ores into it. Now the furnace has its own smelting menu where several smelting operations can be done. It consists of one field for the object that will be smelted, one field for the output object and one field for a fuel. The fuel variates to either log, plank, stick, coal and also the items that you shouldn't use like chests and the workbench. Each operation takes 10 seconds. A pickaxe is required to pick up the furnace. When the furnace has items inside it, do not try to pick it up, because it will destroy the items inside.

The furnace will take time to smelt objects, but it will also work when the smelting menu is closed, as long as there are still objects to smelt and there's enough fuel. If all objects are smelted, the furnace will stop using fuel. When the fuel runs out, the heat in the furnace, indicated by the flame icon, will slowly decrease and when it is gone, the furnace will become inactive. If a smelting process was running, it will be aborted and has to be started again from the beginning.

As a building material
Furnaces take more time to destroy than other blocks, making them a very valuable building material. However, since they require 8 blocks to craft, they are difficult to amass in any large quantities.

Alternative Fuel
Using 43 planks as fuel is the closest you can get to using 8 coal. 43 planks are capable of generating 64.5 smelted blocks.

The bonus of using planks is that it's a renewable resource.

If you want to be really efficient and not lose that half-plank to nothing, put in 44 planks, then, take the first two smelted blocks out, and put two extra unsmelted blocks in.