A long road, not over yet.

Gwibber, the microblogging client of kings, is now ready to go for Ubuntu 9.04. Ryan Paul has put up a Roadmap of what’s to come. Right now the team is focused on bugfixing, bugfixing, and bugfixing. Thanks to Fabien Tassin, Alexander Sack, and Sebastian Bacher for working to get this in in time for Jaunty.

Gwibber

On a related note, noted pixel hero Jakub Steiner has published a kickass dark theme to go along with it. A more conservative theme based on this is being worked on, of course everyone involved would love to see that shipped by default.

I am happy to see Ryan’s code get into Ubuntu, for the longest time gwibber was just a little sandbox for Ryan to mess around with whatever new GNOME tech he wanted to play with. From there it grew into a real project, with contributors to handle and bugs to fix. Adding contributors has helped a bunch, it takes a certain “leap of faith” for someone who hasn’t run an OSS project before to allow contributors to mess around in your swampy mess and help you drain it. Gwibber is finally to the point where there’s healthy non-Ryan people driving development forward. It’s been a learning experience for me as well; pushing out new revisions, doing bug work, and also learning tough lessons (ie. webkit on hardy).

In a way watching gwibber grow to me has many parallels with how our own Ubuntu community has been growing on microblogging services such as identi.ca, where we have grown to become the largest group on the service. Cheers to the core devs, Dominic Evans, Greg Grossmeier, Milo Casagrande, and Ryan Paul. We certainly have a dedicated group of gwibber testers like @technoviking, @gamerchick02, @popey, @gmb, <insert tons of launchpad developers here whom I forget>, @maco, @myrtti, @jdub, @jimmac, and who can forget @bugabundo. Of course thanks to @evan for always supporting the project.

So, get gwibber, get on identi.ca, and join the group sensation. Now, pep talk over, let’s get to work.