Swift 1.0 Beta2

About

This is the second beta (preview) release of Swift, and it is in no way final or feature-complete. The aim of this release is to gain help from the wider community in guiding Swift forward: 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.

Screenshots

First, the screenshots:

Discussion

Comments can be sent to the mailing list at http://swift.im/lists/mailman/listinfo/swift-users, and we have a chat room at swift@rooms.swift.im. It will be very useful if people trying the beta can keep notes on what they find for a couple of days and then send a summary email to the mailing list so we can gauge people's thoughts.

Goals

Swift is trying to plug a hole in the XMPP client landscape, and has these aims.

  • Wide platform availability.
  • Doing the "Right Thing" for the user, without configuration.
  • Doing the "Right Thing" with standards-compliance.
  • Targetting the end-users, not the system administrators.
  • Being an XMPP client - not multi-protocol.
  • Concentrating on the most frequently performed tasks.
  • Never interrupt the user with something that doesn't need attention.

Features of interest

This is a beta, but Swift already has some interesting features.

  • Easy status setting (and plans to make it better).
  • Easy room joining and bookmarking.
  • XEP-0258 Labelling for secure environments.
  • Stream compression for bandwidth-saving.
  • Support for the new SCRAM authentication mechanism.

Changelog

These are the changes since 1.0-beta1:

  • Tall chat windows now use all available space.
  • Fixed crashes where servers didn't return the payload we requested.
  • Pressing 'enter' in the Find MUC input to enter a new service adds the service.
  • Fixed a crash where some servers wrongly claim they support security labels.
  • Windows now have icons (on Windows and Linux).
  • Added an option when joining a room to join it automatically in future.
  • Added tooltips including status types, to help people with difficulty distinguishing Green/Orange/Reds.
  • Rooms now have automatic name completion, activated by press Tab while typing a message.
  • Message history of a room is now stamped with the right time.
  • Other small fixes

Known issues

As this is a beta release, there are known issues and features that you might expect to be present that aren't:

  • Graphical/Rendering glitches.
  • The system tray icon doesn't reflect the current status.
  • You cannot change your avatar.
  • You cannot rename or regroup contacts after they're added.
  • The system tray behaviour on Macs is unexpectedly Windows-like.
  • The Windows installer doesn't detect running Swifts, and sometimes suggests the wrong Start menu group.
  • If you add a room bookmark before the server has returned your existing bookmarks, the server ones may be replaced with the new one.
  • Servers with themselves in their service discovery results may cause the room finder to loop.
  • Status messages are sometimes lost on reconnect after server errors.
  • You cannot create new rooms.
  • In some cases, roster edits from another client running alongside cause the entries to not appear until they change presence.
  • The incoming message sound doesn't play on Linux.

Download

We currently have versions available for Windows and Mac:

  • Windows: Swift-installer-win32-1.0beta2.exe
  • Mac OS X (10.5 or later): Swift-1.0beta2.dmg
  • Ubuntu Linux
    • Karmic Koala (9.10) To stay up to date with the latest release, you can add the following APT lines to the list of Software Sources in Synaptic Package Manager: 
      deb http://swift.im/packages/ubuntu karmic/beta/
deb-src http://swift.im/packages/ubuntu karmic/beta/
    • Lucid Lynx (10.04) To stay up to date with the latest release, you can add the following APT lines to the list of Software Sources in Synaptic Package Manager: 
      deb http://swift.im/packages/ubuntu lucid/beta/
deb-src http://swift.im/packages/ubuntu lucid/beta/

Source

The source code for Swift and the underlying Swiften XMPP library are available from a Gitorious page at http://gitorious.org/swift. Instructions for building the source code can be found in Documentation/BuildingOnUnix.txt and Documentation/BuildingOnWindows.txt.

The source for this release is available under the GNU General Public License version 3.