SwiftKit

SwiftKit (abbreviated SK, formerly SwiftSwitch) is a RuneScape toolkit created and released by Jason Fah. Its primary purpose is to make the RuneScape experience easier and more convenient for the user by providing quick access to popular features, such as integration with guides (including those for quests, areas, and treasure trails), a built-in IRC client, an instant hiscores lookup table, and other tools including timers and counters.

Since SwiftKit is programmed in Visual Basic 6, it will only work on Windows. As of April 2010, there have been no efforts to make SwiftKit cross-platform. While it will not run natively on non-Windows operating systems, limited functionality can be obtained on SwiftKit through virtual machine-ware for Mac and Linux-based systems (e.g. VMWare, Wine).

On 21 April 2010, SwiftKit hit the 2 million download mark, officially making it the most popular RuneScape toolkit of all time.

About


The main features include a skill lookup and calculators, an integrated IRC client, custom timers, built in mini-notepad, lightweight browser, atlas and instant access to zybez databases, which help provide information about everything from NPC's to the prices of various items in the game.

SwiftKit also includes features that are used simply to make playing RuneScape more personalised. These features include an mp3 player, clocks, a customisable link window and a way to take, crop and save screenshots with one click.

Controversy
There has historically been much controversy about whether playing RuneScape with SwiftKit was allowed. At one point, SwiftSwitch - the predecessor to SwiftKit - hid the advertisements for free users, and it also allowed users to automatically attempt to get into a game world, which bypassed the main page and subsequent pages. For a time, world switching via SwiftSwitch also circumvented the mandatory login delay that one would face when normally switching worlds. All of these features were deemed illegal by Jagex in their revision of Rule 7 in March 2007, and they were removed as a result with the release of SwiftKit. Ads can no longer be hidden for free players and only the main RuneScape page can be loaded through SwiftKit. The toolkit presently complies with all rules set by Jagex, and can therefore be used to play RuneScape with guaranteed impunity.

Before Jagex added the official world switching feature, players often faced difficulty switching to a full world, but SwiftSwitch essentially eliminated that hassle. As a result, the feature was considered an unfair advantage by some players and Jagex Moderators alike, and - in lieu of an official statement by Jagex staff - individual Jagex moderators often gave conflicting opinions on whether or not SwiftSwitch violated Rule 7 and thus frequently contradicted each other.

Other features of SwiftSwitch caused controversy even before the implementation of Rule 15. In early 2006, Andrew Gower informed Jason Fah that their advertisers were complaining about ads being hidden from view in non-member worlds. Andrew later sent a complaint in regard to the automatic world loading feature, which caused severe bandwidth usage. These events led to the addition of Rule 15, which prevented users from bypassing navigation to the game through the RuneScape home page and from making repeated automatic responses that could severely deplete the game's bandwidth (i.e. the short-lived "world watcher" feature, which repeatedly checked a full world for you in the background and alerted you whenever you could access it).

Jagex later added a lite version of their highscore page for clients and programs to parse in an effort to decrease the amount of bandwidth used by those tools.