The turn of the month from September to October is beginning to carry a lot of historical significance for BitWise. Today marks the release of BitWise 1.0.3, making BitWise the first and only cross-platform direct-to-IP encrypted voice chat. Don't worry, there are still many new trails to blaze, and we'll keep the "firsts" coming. I think September 30th, however, will be one of those special BitWise dates that I'll always remember.
The days either side of September 30th also carry historical interest. September 29th, 2003 saw the beginning of the 0.9.2.x series with the release of 0.9.2.0. The terminal version of the 0.9.2.x series, 0.9.2.4, was the last testing version before 0.9.8.0, the forced upgrade from the old Windows-only client. 0.9.2.0 was also the first version of the new client that was functional enough for abandonment of the then-current 0.2.1.2 release. That was the turning point of the cross-platform IM dream becoming a reality.
October 1st, 2002 ushered in my personal favorite version of BitWise, 0.1.7.9. This version was so special to me because it was the last version before encryption was added, and stood for about 10 weeks as a bastion of stability and reliability while we worked on encrypting BitWise. Not a single bug report or rumor of a bug reached our ears during these 10 weeks, and the 0.1.7.x series is still the longest series in terms of versions. 0.1.7.9 was also the first version with typing notifications, and I'll never forgot the odd bug we found in testing where typing notifications sent prior to a direct connection being established ended up inserting garbage characters into the message. That was fun to debug.
For anyone looking to kill some time, our Version History pages can make for some interesting reading, observing (and maybe even remembering) how BitWise has really grown over time. If you really think about it, some of change entries are even pretty funny, like this one: "Chat windows are now independent of each other, bringing one to the front will not bring all to the front."
Enjoy the voice chats, and happy reading!