Development on SimplePie 1.1 (“Blackberry”) is wrapping up and we’re planning to push it live sometime over the weekend. This release consists of several bug fixes, including things that were originally scheduled for our 1.0 release that just didn’t make the cutoff. Few, if any, new features will be in this release but it will definitely resolve some of the long-standing issues we’ve had.

This weekend will also see the unveiling of a NEW addition to the SimplePie product line: SimplePie Live! For those who haven’t heard me talk about it before, SimplePie Live makes it easy to add feeds to your websites and webapps using asynchronous JavaScript. SimplePie Live integrates well with modern JavaScript libraries such as Prototype, MooTools, and jQuery, yet still maintains an API that existing SimplePie users will find familiar.

We’ll be launching the very first public beta this weekend so it may still take a little time to work out bugs and document SPLive-specific notes. This is a product that has been a long time coming, and we’re very excited to share it with you all. We’ve got a temporary placeholder page in-place over at http://live.simplepie.org that talks about some of the features (technical and non-technical) and many of the ways where we meet or beat Google’s AJAX Feed API service.

We’ll see you soon! 🙂