Swift 1.0 Beta1

This is the first 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.

First, the screenshots:

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.

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.

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.

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 - particularly maximising chat windows.
• 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.

We currently have versions available for Windows and Mac:

• Windows: Swift-installer-win32-1.0-beta1.exe
• Mac (Snow Leopard only - Leopard is on the way): Swift-1.0-beta1.dmg

Linux packages will be generated soon.

The source code for Swift and the underlying Swiften XMPP library are available from the Git repository at http://swift.im/git/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.