Sweeper v0.2.0 Released
It’s been a while since our last major release of product, this is partly because we’ve been working on big projects like the Queensland Floods and our project with Product (RED), and partly because of the holiday break. However we’re back with a ton of goodies for Sweeper users in 2011.
We’re happy to release the newest build of SwiftRiver:Sweeper today. Here’s a rundown of features from Director of Platform, Matthew Griffiths.
Today we are releasing the latest version of our Sweeper app!
Sweeper 0.2 doesn’t bring a whole lot of new UI wizardry but under the hood we have been beavering away at cool addition after cool addition – plus the odd fix or two for things we didn’t get quite right last time.
In short, some of the wonderful magic you can expect to see in this new release are:
Improved pre-install checks in the Installer
We know that we had some issues with our installer last time out and we have been working hard to fix them for this release. Expect to see new checks for pre-requisites and improved checks around the requirements for the Kohana framework.
Yahoo Placemaker Turbine
By activating this impulse turbine the text of any content coming into Swiftriver can be sent to the ever popular Yahoo Placemaker Service and if they mention a recognizable location then the coordinates of that location can be added to content.
Ushahidi Report Push Turbine
The first – and arguably most important – reactor turbine to be release for the Sweeper app. With the release of this Reactor Turbine you can now twin your sweeper instance with your Ushahidi instance! Something we know a lot of you out there have been waiting for!!!
A ton of new Source Parsers
Allowing users to aggregate content directly into Sweeper from all of these new sources:
- Eventful
- Flickr
- FrontlineSMS
- Google News
- Meetup.com
For those of you out there who are interested in the development side of Sweeper – and Swiftriver as a whole – there has been a whole host of activity that isn’t covered above. Look away now if you are easily offended by techie speak!
We have completely remodeled the presence of Swiftriver on GitHub – those of you who watch the repo will have noticed it already.
We now have separate repos for the main open source component of Swiftriver (you can find them by going to the Ushahidi page on git hub [http://www.github/Ushahidi] and looking for Sweeper, SwiftMeme, SiLCC etc.
As a consequence of this, the old SwiftRiver repo now holds only the framework files and not the individual applications. This is also the reason for the change in version numbering Sweeper and SwiftMeme are at v0.2.0 while SwiftRiver core remains at v0.6.0.
There are some complexities about working with this new repository structure but for all those dev’s out there interested in contributing to the project I will be blogging a little later this month on how exactly to get started with any of the apps.
So, I think that about all for now. Have fun with Sweeper V0.2 and as always give us your feedback if you have any!
