Quote from: Seal on September 11, 2012, 07:41:52 AM

So is this pitched towards existing developers of bitcoin apps/sites? What's your personal goal for the service?

I started developing this client about a year ago when the official client was version 0.3.24 something.
The reason being simple: after a few tries, I couldn't get to compile it on Windows, and I need(ed) some extra features which weren't available at that time:

easy access to any balance, not just those bitcoin addresses of the client wallet;
"raw" transaction interface.

Why do I need those features ?
Well, I'm working on a smart card that is able to sign bitcoin transactions with a setup similar to this: smartcard <-> GUI client <-> BiRD <-> Bitcoin Network
So that's my personal goal. In fact, the project is nearly ready for its first release (but I don't like vapourware, so I did not announce anything yet).
In short, the GUI client does the following:

talks to the smartcard to get its bitcoin addresses
asks via BiRD the open transactions
shows these to the user in a friendly manner
lets the user build a new transaction
asks the smart card to sign it
broadcasts via BiRD the transaction into the Bitcoin network

But I think many kind of applications (websites, even smartphone apps) can benefit from BiRD (being a much easier interface to the block chain), so I decided to make it open-source and available to everyone (it's EUPL).