Today, I'd like to let you know what the future looks like for Birdie.
As some of you may have noticed, development has got back on track during the last few weeks and today I'd like to announce Birdie 1.0 "Roko".
This is a little unusual, as we usually announce new versions on the release day, but this new version won't be out for at least a few weeks. I just couldn't wait to tell you the exciting new features and improvements that the future will bring.
First, I'd like to tell you that lists will be coming to Birdie. This has been a highly requested feature and I understand some of you were expecting it for quite some time now, so I hope you'll be happy to know this :)
Performance. That's something we've been trying to improve every single release, and we think we'll be able to make performance much better in the new release. Bugs will be squashed, like usual, and we believe we've got rid of most crashes already. This version must be rock solid.
We've got a slightly refreshed user interface for the new version, using new Gtk widgets and getting rid of old widgets. This not only allows us to have a better optimized application, but also provides a more polished user interface. The changes we've implemented are subtle, but we believe they make a huge difference when using the app.
You can now load older tweets. This has been highly requested, and it's already implemented. If you like bleeding edge software, you can go try it right now using our daily builds ;)
Some of you may know that Birdie has always been made with elementary OS in mind. With this release, that is changing, because we believe every user should get the same kind of experience. Don't panic, we won't be dropping support for elementary OS. We will however integrate, test and build packages for the most popular distributions out there. Right now, we can confirm Arch Linux, Fedora 20 and Ubuntu 14.04 will be fully supported, as well as elementary OS Freya.
That's pretty much it. I truly believe Birdie 1.0 will offer a much more polished, responsive and stable user experience for everyone.
Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who has ever contributed to Birdie, either through pull requests, bug reports, translations or donations. You make Birdie possible, and it's thanks to people like you that open source is such a great thing. Thanks for keeping us going forward.