Working hard to keep up with the great feedback we’ve been getting on the previous betas, Remko and I are pleased to announce our fourth beta of Swift.

These are the changes since 1.0-beta3:
* The chat window shows the total unread message count, not only the selected chat.
* Room subjects are now shown on join.
* The Find Room window now resizes correctly.
* The Windows installer now puts start menu shortcuts in a sensible place on re-install. This will take effect the second time you run an installer with this fix.
* Fixed a crash involving disconnects or reconnects.
* Various small fixes

Full details at http://swift.im/releases/swift-1.0beta4/

As with the previous betas, please grab the new release and let us know how you get on – what’s good, what’s not so good, and just generally discuss the project in the MUC room – swift@rooms.swift.im

Categories: Swift
1 Comment »

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.

The roster

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.

Categories: Jabber, Swift
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It’s been quite a while since I posted a teaser of the login window and people have been asking for updates since then, so here’s a quick post to appease everyone.

We’ve been making progress steadily over the last 6 months. One of the first things we got going was the chat interface:

It’s minimal, but that’s quite comfortable for us, at the moment. We’ll review that over time, so you may see buttons and icons appearing there in the future.

More recently, we’ve spent quite a while working on the contact list:

I was initially reticent to use custom rendering code for Qt’s views but in the end it seems to have turned out alright for us.

So where does that leave us – will it be another 6 months before we blog again?
I hope not – Remko and I are working towards an internal 1.0 Release Candidate quite hard now, and it hopefully won’t be a vast amount of time before we post about that. After 1.0RC, we’ll start making the builds gradually less private (to manage the amount of feedback we get) until we work to the big 1.0 release day.

Categories: Jabber, Swift
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A first look at Swift’s UI…

Categories: Swift
5 Comments »

Over the last week since Remko announced Swift, people have shown far more interest than we’d been expecting, and have mostly been asking the same questions. While Remko and I haven’t got answers to all the questions ourselves yet, here’s a preliminary effort to share our thoughts as they currently are.

What’s your release schedule?

We’re working to a monthly internal release schedule, but we don’t have a date set for a public release. There are plenty of good XMPP clients already, and we don’t see any value in adding to this until Swift can distinguish itself.

What toolkit are you using?

We’re writing all logic and protocol code in a toolkit-agnostic way. We’re currently working on a Qt-based GUI layer, and others are on the cards.

What license will it be released under?

We honestly don’t have an answer to this yet. We want Swift to be free, and we want the source to be free. We also want to investigate options for supplying Swift and its library commercially. Until we know the best way to do this, there’s an open question here.

Does this mean Psi is dead?

Not at all. While we’ve both been a core part of Psi for more years than we can count, Psi’s future is looking bright, and I’m sure that’ll continue.

Will it be multi-protocol?

We have no plans for Swift to speak any protocols other than XMPP.

Why start another client?

A bunch of reasons. We could have forked Psi, but Psi was always designed with different goals in mind than Swift’s. Psi’s had to make lots of decisions over the last 8 years, and some of them we’ll make differently for Swift’s different aims. Plus we’ve both been working on Psi for a long time; it’s good to try something new.

Will it have the same features as all the other clients?

No. At least, not initially. Our focus is on adding only the core functions to Swift, and getting those “just so” before we move on to adding a new feature.

Will it be cross-platform?

Yes, we’re targeting Windows, Mac OS X and Linux with our first GUI layer. We may add to this later.

Categories: Swift
3 Comments »