High-resolution (512 x 512)

I wanted to keep it the same with it’s windows counter-part. Now that it required a much higher resolution I took the time to add a few features to it.

Feel free to use it for promotion or personal use. Just if you modify it or use it for any of your projects please credit me (zpoon.ca).

Let me take you back roughly 18 months.

<insert crossfade here>

I was exactly the person I described above, looking multiple times for a SwiftKit version for the Mac. Mac users will know what I’m talking about here, but if you have ever tried playing RuneScape through a browser and browse the internet at the same time it is very unstable and the browser sometimes crashes, ending both your RuneScape and web browsing adventures. I had waited long enough and decided to put an end to this myself by creating an Application that was simply a website that loaded the RuneScape homepage – keeping my ‘scaping and web browsing to separate Applications. It worked very well, and if the browser crashed it would no longer take RuneScape with it.

This simple client was pretty much a mimic of the official RuneScape client Jagex released. It was written in Objective-C, which is the standard programming language for all things Mac. At this stage I barely knew anything about Objective-C so it was a stretch for me doing what I actually managed to do.

I used this client privately for 6 months, before somebody from Runescape Community (Maxman) messaged me asking about RuneScape on his newly acquired Mac. I sent him a version of my private client, which a few days later I posted in the programming and web development section and created a SourceForge page for. As it gained popularity the suggestions were always the same, which as you can probably guess was the suggestion of a highscore lookup feature. I ended up teaching myself the bare bones of Objective-C to get this implemented (it was also my most desired feature too). This version remained the same for about 7 months (with a few minor updates when new skills/minigames were released).

There are probably quite a few Mac users reading this right now that actually use that version to play.

Here is the original forum thread that I used

After finishing a unit in mobile development at Uni, my name came up when my lecturer’s friend was looking for a developer. This job was coding for the iPhone – in Objective-C. A few months later I decided to recode my RuneScape client project from scratch, as the older code was horrible compared to what I had learned at work. I recoded it including a price lookup and a custom links section, very similar to SwiftKit… which is what I’m getting to.

Just before I was about to release this new version the SwiftKit team contacted me asking if I would consider joining them to bring SwiftKit officially to the Mac. I accepted of course!

<insert another crossfade here>

In the past few weeks I have been adding some additional features bringing it up to par with the Windows counterpart in terms of basic features – and a few extras (get working Strider, *whip*).

As development is now coming to an end you can prepare to see an open beta released very soon, so keep an eye on www.swiftkit.net!

Don’t get too excited now, but here’s a few pictures.

If you’re a Mac user and you play RuneScape then chances are you have looked at SwiftKit praying for a Mac OS X version, but got delivered that dreaded “SwiftKit is Windows only, there will never be a Mac version” answer.

Let me take you back roughly 18 months.

<insert crossfade here>

I was exactly the person I described above, looking multiple times for a SwiftKit version for the Mac. Mac users will know what I’m talking about here, but if you have ever tried playing RuneScape through a browser and browse the internet at the same time it is very unstable and the browser sometimes crashes, ending both your RuneScape and web browsing adventures. I had waited long enough and decided to put an end to this myself by creating an Application that was simply a website that loaded the RuneScape homepage – keeping my ‘scaping and web browsing to separate Applications. It worked very well, and if the browser crashed it would no longer take RuneScape with it.

This simple client was pretty much a mimic of the official RuneScape client Jagex released. It was written in Objective-C, which is the standard programming language for all things Mac. At this stage I barely knew anything about Objective-C so it was a stretch for me doing what I actually managed to do.

I used this client privately for 6 months, before somebody from Runescape Community (Maxman) messaged me asking about RuneScape on his newly acquired Mac. I sent him a version of my private client, which a few days later I posted in the programming and web development section and created a SourceForge page for. As it gained popularity the suggestions were always the same, which as you can probably guess was the suggestion of a highscore lookup feature. I ended up teaching myself the bare bones of Objective-C to get this implemented (it was also my most desired feature too). This version remained the same for about 7 months (with a few minor updates when new skills/minigames were released).

There are probably quite a few Mac users reading this right now that actually use that version to play.

Here is the forum thread that I used: http://forums.zybez.net/topic/1330565-open-source-mac-runescape-client/

After finishing a unit in mobile development at Uni, my name came up when my lecturer’s friend was looking for a developer. This job was coding for the iPhone – in Objective-C. A few months later I decided to recode my RuneScape client project from scratch, as the older code was horrible compared to what I had learned at work. I recoded it including a price lookup and a custom links section, very similar to SwiftKit… which is what I’m getting to.

Just before I was about to release this new version the SwiftKit team contacted me asking if I would consider joining them to bring SwiftKit officially to the Mac. I accepted of course!

<insert another crossfade here>

In the past few weeks I have been adding some additional features bringing it up to par with the Windows counterpart in terms of basic features – and a few extras (get working Strider, *whip*).

As the development is now coming to an end you can prepare to see the it released very soon, so stay tuned.

Don’t get too excited now, but here’s a few pictures.If you’re a Mac user and you play RuneScape then chances are you have looked at SwiftKit praying for a Mac OS X version, but got delivered that dreaded “SwiftKit is Windows only, there will never be a Mac version” answer.

Let me take you back roughly 18 months.

<insert crossfade here>

I was exactly the person I described above, looking multiple times for a SwiftKit version for the Mac. Mac users will know what I’m talking about here, but if you have ever tried playing RuneScape through a browser and browse the internet at the same time it is very unstable and the browser sometimes crashes, ending both your RuneScape and web browsing adventures. I had waited long enough and decided to put an end to this myself by creating an Application that was simply a website that loaded the RuneScape homepage – keeping my ‘scaping and web browsing to separate Applications. It worked very well, and if the browser crashed it would no longer take RuneScape with it.

This simple client was pretty much a mimic of the official RuneScape client Jagex released. It was written in Objective-C, which is the standard programming language for all things Mac. At this stage I barely knew anything about Objective-C so it was a stretch for me doing what I actually managed to do.

I used this client privately for 6 months, before somebody from Runescape Community (Maxman) messaged me asking about RuneScape on his newly acquired Mac. I sent him a version of my private client, which a few days later I posted in the programming and web development section and created a SourceForge page for. As it gained popularity the suggestions were always the same, which as you can probably guess was the suggestion of a highscore lookup feature. I ended up teaching myself the bare bones of Objective-C to get this implemented (it was also my most desired feature too). This version remained the same for about 7 months (with a few minor updates when new skills/minigames were released).

There are probably quite a few Mac users reading this right now that actually use that version to play.

Here is the forum thread that I used: http://forums.zybez.net/topic/1330565-open-source-mac-runescape-client/

After finishing a unit in mobile development at Uni, my name came up when my lecturer’s friend was looking for a developer. This job was coding for the iPhone – in Objective-C. A few months later I decided to recode my RuneScape client project from scratch, as the older code was horrible compared to what I had learned at work. I recoded it including a price lookup and a custom links section, very similar to SwiftKit… which is what I’m getting to.

Just before I was about to release this new version the SwiftKit team contacted me asking if I would consider joining them to bring SwiftKit officially to the Mac. I accepted of course!

<insert another crossfade here>

In the past few weeks I have been adding some additional features bringing it up to par with the Windows counterpart in terms of basic features – and a few extras (get working Strider, *whip*).

As the development is now coming to an end you can prepare to see the it released very soon, so stay tuned.

Don’t get too excited now, but here’s a few pictures.

The icons should be pushed with the next update, along with a few other features that we’ve added. The next area I’ll focus on is the main screen, and making that area a bit more pretty. The current brown mess isn’t going to be sticking around for long.

Version 1.0 at the moment features a highscores lookup. However with future updates we plan to expand on the content to include database lookups (prices, items, monsters, clans), Adventure Log, basic calculators, notifications and much more.

If you do have an Android device we encourage you to install it and let us know how it performs, positively or negatively.

If we had a big beefy dedicated server at our disposal the implementation of such a feature would most likely of been quite trivial. A simple connection between SwiftKit and the server with a ping pong type system to validate connectivity would of been fine, then we could of just counted the number of connections and voila. The problem was we knew the number of SwiftKit users at any given time would be anywhere between 5 and 20 thousand. So we couldn’t do the method mentioned above on the resources that were available to us.

Eventually we came up with a viable solution, one that would work with the resources we had. Every three minutes SwiftKit would silently load a webpage(less than 1kb) on one of our servers. This webpage contained only a script that would add an entry to our Users Online database, adding a unique id and an expire time which was the current time plus 200 seconds. Since this is done every 3 minutes we add an entry once, after that we use the unique id to update the expire time. Finally a script is run on the server every five minutes that remove any entries in the database that are less than the current time. In other words, it deletes all the expired entries.

So with this method, we finally have a way to count the number of active SwiftKit Users and not use up too many resources on our server. The SwiftKit update 1.30 was when we added it in, but no mention of it was made as we wanted to test it first. Initially there were a few problems with the database server, the main one was it kept hitting the max connection limit. A few tweaks and optimizations were made(mainly replacing Apache with Lighttpd) the server began to handle it just fine. In fact better than expected, this weekend should be interesting though as the weekends are the busiest time.

So now on the SwiftKit website you can check out how many active SwiftKit users there are. Currently at the time of writing this there are a bit over 11,000  users using it at once. For kicks we added a % of current RuneScape players figure, this figure is a little off though as the SwiftKit Users figure also takes into account those who have left SwiftKit open and are logged off.

If you are aware of a better method for counting users of a desktop application I’d love to hear about it. Obviously our method isn’t mind blowing, but it seems to be working. Feel free to leave a comment or some constructive criticism if you have it.

Links:
http://www.swiftkit.net/index.php?page=stats