📍 New York, USA

📍 New York, USA

📍 Kyoto, Japan 📷 FUJIFILM X-T30 II, XF18-55mm

📍 Kyoto, Japan

📷 FUJIFILM X-T30 II, XF18-55mm

Introducing Mythblade

This has been a long time in the making, but today I’m ready to unveil a little project I’ve been working on.

Building video games is hard. Building an MMORPG? That’s the hardest genre you could possibly build.

Most game developers would tell you building an MMORPG alone is a terrible idea. And they’d be absolutely right. The content, the interconnected systems, the networking, the server management, the endless balancing, the list goes on and on. But here I am, ignoring all common sense, and doing it anyway. Even if it is a bit mad.

Mythblade is mostly text-based, and is very much modelled after retro RPGs. It is playable across a range of devices, including mobile phones. And it is incredibly fun, if I may say so myself.

After countless nights of iteration after iteration, and incorporating some fantastic feedback from a small group of alpha testers, I’m pretty happy with the state of the game. And I’m ready to start accepting beta testers over at https://www.mythblade.com.

There’s still a lot to do. There might some bumps along the way, but if you’re curious about how it all unfolds, feel free to join me for the ride.

📍 Crete, Greece 📷 FUJIFILM X-T30 II, XF18-55mm

📍 Crete, Greece

📷 FUJIFILM X-T30 II, XF18-55mm

Post Once, Syndicate Everywhere

As a long-time fan of the POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) model, I've always believed in maintaining control over my content. However, I've never been good at the second part: making sure my content reaches as many people as possible.

Over the last few weeks I've done a major rebuild of my personal website, and I used it as an opportunity to try and tackle this problem.

Now, when I publish a new post or photo, many things happen in the background and my content is automatically sent to all corners of the Internet.

Depending on the type of content, there's a few different actions that my little queue worker might do:
- A post is submitted to X using their API.
- An email is sent out to my website subscribers.
- A post is created in LinkedIn.
- A post gets sent out to all my fediverse followers.

And I'm sure this list will grow as time passes. Did I mention my website is now a fully working ActivityPub server? That was fun.

Anyway, this is my first real world test. If you're reading this, chances are it worked. Probably.

Back to Basics

It's been a long time since I've had my own blog. Too long, in fact. In a world ruled by social media, it's easy to let go of owning your own little corner of the Internet.

I'll start with a quick introduction:

I'm Ivo. I'm a software engineer at heart, working with a brilliant team of engineers at GoProposal by Sage. I'm also known by some as having a particular weakness for guitars.

I enjoy a good technical challenge, and will in the future be sharing some of my learnings with you.

See you soon.

📍 Stockholm, Sweden

📍 Stockholm, Sweden

📍 Copenhagen, Denmark

📍 Copenhagen, Denmark

📍 Dublin, Ireland

📍 Dublin, Ireland

📍 Mdina, Malta

📍 Mdina, Malta

📍 New York, USA

📍 New York, USA

📍 New York, USA

📍 New York, USA

📍 Oia, Greece

📍 Oia, Greece

📍 San Francisco, USA

📍 San Francisco, USA

📍 San Francisco, USA

📍 San Francisco, USA

📍 Valletta, Malta

📍 Valletta, Malta

📍 Paris, France

📍 Paris, France

📍 Málaga, Spain 📷 PENTAX K10D, Tamron AF 18-250mm

📍 Málaga, Spain

📷 PENTAX K10D, Tamron AF 18-250mm

📍 London, United Kingdom 📷 PENTAX K10D, Tamron AF 18-250mm

📍 London, United Kingdom

📷 PENTAX K10D, Tamron AF 18-250mm

📍 Algés, Portugal

📍 Algés, Portugal

Birdie 1.1 Released

Birdie 1.1 "Flugas" is now available.

It features performance optimizations, better thumbnails, bug fixes and updated translations. In addition, it now compiles on ARM architectures (tested on armv7).

This minor release is recommended to all Birdie 1.0 users.

Birdie 1.0 Released

About a month after our latest announcement, we can say that Birdie 1.0 "Roko" is ready.

Excited? We are, because we believe Birdie 1.0 is the best release we have ever had.

Lists have arrived to Birdie. Performance is better than ever. The app is much more stable than it ever was. We've got a refreshed user interface, which not only allows us to have a better optimized application, but also provides a more polished user interface. The changes are subtle but essential. You can now load older tweets. And we've finally got autocompletion for users and hashtags.

We believe everyone should be able to enjoy Birdie. This is why starting with this release, we are providing packages for multiple distributions. We had announced we would be support Arch Linux, Fedora 20, Ubuntu 14.04 and elementary OS Freya, and today we can reveal that the list is even bigger. openSUSE is officially supported, and we are also providing a backport for Ubuntu 13.10.

We truly believe this is the best release we have ever had. We hope you'll agree. You can get it right now.

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.

Birdie 1.0 Announcement

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.

Birdie 0.3 "Konversacio" is here

Birdie 0.3 "Konversacio" is now available. Since the last release, we've been refining Birdie to meet the high standards our users expect. We don't want it to crash or slow down, just like our users don't.

This releases implements a long-awaited feature, threaded conversations, and comes with the usual bug fixes and improvements. Translations have been updated, bugs have been squashed and Birdie's reliability is better than ever. We've made Granite optional, so you can enjoy Birdie on more distributions. We've integrated Birdie with the latest Ubuntu versions. Overall, this release has been about polish.

With this update, we can now move our focus to the next big milestone: Birdie 1.0. We think this version is a great foundation for the future of Birdie, and we will build the next Birdie on top of it. Version 1.0 won't be a small update. It won't be something meaningless. It will be the most important step yet in Birdie's tiny lifetime. It will be more polished. It will have a level of integration with elementary OS unlike ever before. It will be fast, simple and intuitive. You can be sure we will continue our vision to create the best Twitter experience available on elementary OS.

Thanks for your support, and we hope you enjoy this new release :)