Good IRC clients?
There used to be some really good OS 9 IRC applications available (ircle & snak). For some reason, their OS X transition didn't impress me. I'm hoping there is some gem that I'm overlooking ( kind of like what Frogblast is to Hotline connect ).
I've read about X-Chat Aqua, but it isn't very impressing.
I've read about X-Chat Aqua, but it isn't very impressing.
Comments
Neil.
a.k.a. Arnel
One of the most annoying things about most of the OS X IRC clients is that there is no scripting language for them. I have to learn ObjC and Cocoa to write a plugin for them just to make /t an alias for /topic. Or even at that to make /topic display the topic for the current active channel window instead of forcing me to type /topic #channel each time. Or even not allowing /topic #channel without a topic after #channel to just echo the current topic instead of giving a "Error, you don't have permission to change the topic" message. Those are just some of my annoyances.
Before anyone suggests IrssiX to me, every time I've tried that it's only taken 4 or 5 minutes of use to crash the thing. So I'll refrain.
Sorry for the rant. I just get annoyed at the lack of a decent graphical IRC client for OS X.
Originally posted by pyr3
...writing up a proper IRC client with an interface that I like is a project I would like to spend some of my free time on.
This was my exact thought. However, after looking at the above forementioned application, I do not feel as if their is a need any more
Originally posted by maaaaark
This was my exact thought. However, after looking at the above forementioned application, I do not feel as if their is a need any more
I've used Colloquy and spoken with their devs. Their aim is to make it a chat client more than an IRC client. Things like 'somebody left the room' instead of a distinction between leaving a channel and quitting the server. So you don't know if someone just timed out to the server, or just decided not to talk to you anymore. Their response to me on that one was that it doesn't matter because they are just no longer in the room and that it shouldn't matter to me if they are still on the server, but just not in the channel vs. leaving the server altogether.
That and the chat logging capabilities were limited and XML-based vs. straight text format. Creating XSLT themes for the interface was sort of a pain as well. At least on my laptop (Powerbook 667MHz), just having it open and joined into a couple of channels idling for a while slowed the program down. The only reason I can see for this would possibly be the use of Webkit to render all of the channel text. Basically each channel is an XML file that is constantly being appended to with an XLST file attached to it to provide the theme.
Note, I'm not ripping the devs. They were cool, it's just that the interface/direction of the project is not for me. One good thing I liked about it was that it was using IRSSI's irc protocol engine. That takes a lot of the work of providing support for all of the different IRC servers and variations out of their hands.