Over the last 12 months I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the future of Vienna. It’s quite obvious that Vienna needs some love to bring it up to date and make it the reliable and enjoyable experience it once was.

Probably the biggest problem I have with working on Vienna is that the codebase is an absolute mess, basically a Big ball of mud. This makes enhancements extremely difficult and time consuming and makes me reluctant to work on Vienna which obviously isn’t a good thing. Apple have added a lot of new functionality to AppKit over the last few years which would allow us to strip a lot of ugly code out of Vienna.

I have done some experiments on a future foundation for Vienna over the last few months and I’m waiting to see what Apple unveils at WWDC in a couple of days before I confirm with @barijaona which approach we will take. Some of the things you can count on though are listed below. I’ll post a follow-up after WWDC with any relevant changes.

  • Written in Swift to allow the new generation of iOS and OS X developers to help out
  • Proper accessibility support
  • Vienna will remain free and open source and will also be available on the Mac App Store
  • A refreshed UI and icons
  • Improved translations
  • More reliable cloud sync

I’m looking forward to watching the WWDC keynote!