A short while ago I came across news on Twitter and Google+ that my longtime favorite Twitter client for Linux , would be shutting down development. I was extremely sad to hear this so I contacted Ivo Nunes, the main developer for the project, to see if he would be open to the idea of me taking over development. He was very agreeable, so I am excited to announce that I will be developing Birdie 2.0. Ivo will continue to be a part of the project working on other areas as he sees fit

I’m also excited to announce that with this hand-off Birdie will once again be written in Vala, and that the existing 2.0 code will be ported back from Python.

I’m writing this just after my conversation with Ivo so I don’t have any other specific information to share. This will not interfere with the release of Vocal 1.0. Vocal is currently extremely close to the release candidate stage, and should be available within the next month or so. Right now I’m planning on working on Birdie throughout the summer and having a final release somewhere within that time-frame, but I’ve not yet looked at the code enough to make any accurate estimates.

I’m excited to help make Birdie as great as I possibly can and get the next major version in the hands of free software users as soon as possible.