Psi Team Blog

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!

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!

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!

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!

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).