Last sunday, we finished our week-long Swift Hackathon, and it was a great success, leading to Swift 2.0-beta1! Here’s a list of the things we achieved during that week.

Continue reading →

After another year of development, we’re happy to announce that we released our first Swift 2.0 beta! We encourage everyone who is interested in helping us with testing to try out this new release, as it has many bugfixes and enhancements (see the release notes for more details).

Thanks to the hackathon week (of which details will be posted shortly), we believe this first beta to be pretty stable. Nevertheless, should you find some bugs, please come and tell us about it!

In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, Steve Jobs explained how his interest in typography played a fundamental role in creating the first Macintosh computer, and how the beautiful typography set the Mac apart from other personal computers out there. He was obviously passionate about these things, going as far as pixel-perfectionism about fonts and icons. That’s why I was a bit shocked when I started noticing bad kerning (aka keming) in the iOS 5 status bar. Could it be that these are the first artifacts of the post-Steve Jobs World? (Update: No)

Spoiler alert: As XKCD points out, recognizing bad kerning is something you may not want to learn about. If you like your iOS status bar, consider not reading on.

Continue reading →

We’re just halfway through our Swift Hackathon, so we thought we'ld update you about the progress we’ve made so far.

Continue reading →

It’s that time of year again: Google announced which students they are going to sponsor for contributing to open source projects. This year, we have the pleasure of welcoming 3 students at Swift, who will be working on some very exciting projects.

Continue reading →

All the cool kids are doing it, and so are we: starting Monday April 23rd, we’re holding a week long Swift hackathon! We will be focusing for a whole week on bugfixes, and at the end of that week release the first beta of Swift 2.0, the next major Swift release. Everyone is invited to join us online in our chatroom at swift@rooms.swift.im, and start hacking with us. And if you can’t or don’t want to fix bugs, we also need plenty of people to help us with testing Swift extensively that week.

(Thanks to Tobias for suggesting this).

It’s been a busy summer for Tobias Markmann, one of the XMPP Standards Foundation’s 2011 Google Summer of Code students. He has been working on implementing File Transfer support for Swift, using the fresh Jingle XMPP protocols. I’m happy to announce that we integrated Tobias’s work as an experimental feature into the main Swift branch, where it will be further developed and brushed off before being enabled in our nightly builds and releases.

Continue reading →

The official Twitter for Mac app gives a great interface for Twitter: lightweight, compact, no bloat, and it looks great. Unfortunately, amongst the hundreds of Twitter clients already existing, I couldn’t find anything similar for Linux or Windows. Instead of creating yet another client (which Twitter doesn’t like anyway), I did a bit of Qt WebKit coding, and created a small desktop client around the (current) Twitter Mobile Web interface.

Update: The mobile Twitter website was updated, and doesn’t work as well anymore with TwitCoop. I will try to upgrade TwitCoop to work with the new interface, but it is currently not clear whether this is at all possible.

Continue reading →

Yesterday, Google announced the 1116 students that were accepted for this year’s edition of the Google Summer of Code, 5 of which will be working with the XMPP Standards Foundation. We’re very happy to welcome both Tobias Markmann and Vlad Voicu, who will be working full-time on Swift this summer, implementing file transfer support and conversation history respectively.

We have to mention that these weren’t the only proposals we received. Most of the proposals we received this year were of good quality: we suspect that the teaser tasks we put up for potential students made it possible for both the students and us to get an idea up front of what should be expected. However, based on experience from previous years, we decided we should only accept 2 students, to ensure that we could give our full attention to making all projects successful (including fast integration into a Swift release). We’re convinced that both Vlad and Tobias will live up to their expectations, and implement some of the most requested Swift features today!

Finally! After 2 years of development, we’re happy to finally announce the first full release of the Swift IM client! In this first release, we have focused on building a user-friendly messaging client, with all the basic features you would typically need for having real-time conversations. In future versions (which are already in the works as we speak), we will be extending Swift with more features.

We would like to thank Isode for sponsoring time for Kevin to work on Swift, Flosoft for providing our download infrastructure, Dave Cridland for the logo, all the translators who helped us make Swift available in different languages, all the code contributors, all of whom should be listed on our About page, and all our beta testers for giving us feedback and bugreports throughout the whole development period!