El Tramo

Swift Hackathon Roundup

2012-05-06T00:00:00+02:00

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.

First of all, the goal of the week was to find and fix as many bugs as possible. This is what our ‘hackathon bug count dials’ were displaying at the end of the week:

In only one week, we found 19 bugs, and fixed 64! Not a bad result for our first hackathon, don’t you think? As you can see from the trend, we put a big dent in the list of open bugs:

And if fixing all these bugs wasn’t enough, we found the time to do some other things on the side as well during the week:

Together with Olly Betts, we finished our Debian packages, and submitted them to Debian. So, expect both Swift and Swiften to be available from the official Debian repositories soon!
We set up a build for the brand new Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)
We started fixing and cleaning up translation strings

Thanks again to all the people who have helped us during this excellent week!

Swift 2.0-beta1 Released

2012-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

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!

Steve Jobs would not appr o ve

2012-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

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.

Have a look at the battery level indicator of the iOS screenshot below:

Now compare that 44 with the one from the clock. Doesn’t look right, does it? How about something a bit more obvious: charge your iDevice to 100%, and you see the following:

That 1 in the battery level almost looks like it’s coming from a different font?! Still not convinced? How about anything in the 10-19% range?

You have to admit that this is much worse than pixel-imperfectionisms. Even if this was post-Steve, or Steve always had his battery level indicator turned off, you would have come to expect someone at Apple must be annoyed by this, surely?

I know I’m nitpicking, but the problem is that, if you noticed it once, you will notice it every time you look at your status bar. The only solution: disable the battery level indicator.

Swift Hackathon Update

2012-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

We’re just halfway through our Swift Hackathon, so we thought we'ld update you about the progress we’ve made so far. In fact, a screenshot of our live hackathon week bug counter sums this up quite well:

That’s right: in merely a couple of days, we managed to fix 50 (more than half!) of the open bugs, and found 17 new bugs. And what’s more: we still have the whole weekend ahead of us, so you still have a chance to join us in fixing, testing, and improving Swift!

A big thank you to all the people who have been helping us out so far!

Google Summer of Code 2012

2012-04-25T00:00:00+02:00

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.

This summer, you’ll see the following new faces hanging around the Swift room:

Cătălin Badea will finally bring us the long awaited “Conversation History” support, using the newly minted Message Archive Management XEP
Mateusz Piękos will be adding shared whiteboarding functionality
Yoann Blein is going to implement screen sharing using Jingle

Since Kevin and I could only mentor Cătălin and Mateusz, and we really wanted to have Yoann join us as well, we decided to bring in some extra help this year. Tobias, who not only has participated in GSoC 4 times as a student, but also is a top Swift contributor, and authored practically all of the Swift Jingle code during GSoC last year, will be mentoring Yoann in the screen sharing project.

As you can see: great times ahead!

Swift Hackathon

2012-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

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).

Experimental File Transfer support hits Swift

2011-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

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.

For those interested in the nitty gritty protocol details: file transfers are negotiated through the Jingle File Transfer protocol (XEP-0234), using SOCKS5 (XEP-0260) as the main transport, and In-Band Bytestreams (XEP-0261) as fallback. To improve connectivity, we use both the NAT Port Mapping Protocol and the UPnP Internet Gateway Device protocols to allow connections through most firewalls, and SOCKS5 relaying proxies in case all else fails.

The new feature has been tested for interoperability against (slightly modified) development versions of both Pidgin and Gajim, which, together with the Pidgin-based Adium, cover a large XMPP user base. After both clients update their protocols to track the newly published Draft specification versions, all 3 should be able to exchange files seamlessly.

What still remains to be done is lots of testing (both internal testing, user testing, reliability testing, and interop testing), bugfixing, and some refactoring here and there to clean up some of the code (which already is in very good shape). Our end goal is to reach a rock solid implementation, with a near guarantee that file exchange will always work (which experience teaches us is far from trivial).

To conclude, we’ld like to thank Tobias for contributing this great new feature to Swift, for providing valuable protocol feedback to the XSF, and for laying the foundation to other exciting Jingle-based features (including voice/video conferencing).

TwitCoop: A Desktop Cage for Twitter Mobile Web

2011-05-25T00:00:00+02:00

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.

First, some screenshots:

Features of this desktop interface include:

Compact
Provides an “official”, consistent Twitter interface
Automatically refreshes when new tweets are available (with a higher refresh rate than the default mobile web interface)
Opens external (i.e. non-Twitter) links in your preferred web browser
Allows you to hide the Tweet box, when screen real estate is a problem (e.g. on netbooks)
Allows you to customize the zoom level
Automatically logs you into your previous Twitter session on startup
Supports “kinetic scrolling”
Works on Windows and Linux

Note that some of these features may become obsolete once the new mobile interface becomes available to everyone, and maybe some stuff will break, so I will need to update this then. The mobile web application isn’t as responsive as a real native client, but this may change with the new mobile interface as well.

You can try it out for yourself by downloading the Windows version (requires the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, which may already be installed on your system), or by building it yourself from the development repository.

Summer of Swift Code 2011

2011-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

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!

Swift 1.0 Released

2011-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

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!