Ivo and Vasco Nunes started the Birdie project in 2013 to bring a great native Twitter experience to the new elementary desktop.

Thanks to their hard work, and the work of many other contributors, plus some great initial design work from incredibly talented people (including Daniel Foré), Birdie saw its first release back in March 2013. Under Ivo’s direction, the release was a great success and was followed by several incremental updates in the 1.0 series.

In the spring of 2015, Ivo announced that Birdie was going to be abandoned unless a developer would be willing to take over the project. Nathan Dyer, the developer of another popular elementary app, jumped at the opportunity, and will be working hard to craft the future of Birdie.

A short while ago I came across news on Twitter and Google+ that Birdie, 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.