Long pending updates on Spicebird Development

The Spicebird team was working behind-the-doors for quiet some time and its probably time to start involving the community more closely and to start posting updates more frequently - one summary update every week apart from the normal feature/development blogs.

Here is the current status of Spicebird and following it are the expected timelines for the 0.7 release.

The main features that were to be included in Spicebird 0.7 are the multi-protocol instant-messaging, the new face of blogging and of-course a lot of smaller look-and-feel and functionality fixes.

We started off expecting to build support for a “few famous” instant-messaging protocols and then we stumbled upon the Telepathy framework which made us rethink the “few famous” part.  Telepathy is a D-Bus based unified framework for many kinds of real-time communications - it allows protocol transparent handling of instant-messaging both textual and multimedia.  As a first step the current trunk of Spicebird already has support for one-to-one chat using the Yahoo, OSCAR, AIM, Jabber, ICQ and MSN protocols!

More details on Telepathy and how it can effect the user is out of the scope of this post, but please bear in mind that code in these parts of the trunk is rapidly changing and is pretty unstable

The next one is the new-face of blogging.  The work here is still in progress - keeping minor bugs aside, the system is already working well with Wordpress.

About the timelines of the next Spicebird Beta release, we are expecting to ship the 0.7 release in the second week of October and will follow it up with a quick next release cycle of two months.