Songs of Doom

Archive for May, 2010

First public Swift beta released.

7:38 pm

Over a year ago (while writing XMPP: The Definitive Guide with Peter Saint-Andre) Remko Tronçon and I were reviewing the current state of XMPP clients and saw a gap for a simple cross-platform client targeting normal end-users who just want to chat. Swift is the client that we’ve been working on since then to fill this hole, and now we’d like your help with the project. Swift assumes that what you want to do most in your client is chat – either with a single person or a group of people – and that the experience should be based on making this easy and enjoyable.

The first public beta (preview) of Swift is now released, and we’d like you to help us. Primarily, we’d like feedback from you as to what needs to be done now, and also to find any issues – either technical or in usability – with what we’ve already done. This isn’t a final release, so you shouldn’t download it unless you’re willing to find issues in it, and report them back to us so we can improve it.

Swift Roster
The roster

Swift Chat View
A chat room.

We’ve got Windows and Mac binaries ready so far. The source compiles on Windows, Mac and Linux, and with a little coaxing I even managed to give a demo on an N900 Maemo phone at FOSDEM this year.

The Swift 1.0-beta1 release page has links to the downloads and the source, visit it now and get started with Swift, and then use the mailing list, or the MUC room (swift@rooms.swift.im) to start discussing it.

XMPP: The Definitive Guide for $9.99

2:09 pm

I’ve just read that O’Reilly are doing just about every ebook in their store for just $9.99 today, so if you’ve not got your copy of XMPP: The Definitive Guide yet, this is a great opportunity to save some money (oh, and they sell other books too).

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596521271, use code ‘FAVFA’ at checkout.

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