Shellscape Irc Client

[andrew_]

Yeah, I havent really decided on a name for it yet, as it's still in development. Those of you familiar with mac apps will notice a familiarity with Linkinus and Colloquy.

why

I got started writing a basic irc client for integration into a few other programs. When I got to a certain point, I decided that I wanted to theme the channel windows on a per server/channel basis and I wanted something really flexible. (Details on how I implemented it when it's released ) After implementing the theming it really didnt make any sense to just leave it as an embedded client, so I decided to go ahead and make it a full client.

what

It's just a basic, multiserver irc client at the moment. I like apps with the basics. There's no support for scripting (though, there WILL be support for c# and vb.net scripting much further down the road), no fancy window tiling, no dcc and the configuration is simplistic and easy to understand. The goal for me was to produce an easy to use, easy to understand irc client. As most on windows are far from simplistic and most beginners [who are not geeks] are intimidated by them [in my experience].

when

I'm hoping to have a beta ready for public consumption by the end of February. Key word 'hoping'

eyecandy

[schmrom]

Wow, looks really promising! looking forward to the first beta

[matonga]

I know this is not an appropiate question, being it a simplistic client, but... will it support / commands?

[Dream_Team]

Wow I must admit : It looks good.

I think this one looks better than Linkinus, even with XP default theme ! Maybe i'm just getting bored of the "everything must be grey" policy of leopard.

Good luck on this, doing an irc client can seem easy but some servers just don't want to do what the RFC says, and it's like hell for programmers (I did an irc client this summer for praticing Object oriented languages and how I could manage socket threads, but yours seems more polished).

PS : You are totally right about irc clients, I can't stand mirc (it's getting old) until I use some script (NoName Script) ... But the problem is that they want to do everything and asks us too many things. We need an client that just asks server name, user name (and password) and perform commands. Sure some things like nickserv recognition (like colloquy does) that asks your password in a system box (so nobody can see your password) are nice, but not vital. No need to ask hostname and all (From my experience with other people, most of the fields are full of "fdussdfuis" since they just want to connect to their server), don't do things like "when the app is closed you are still connected" in linkinus

Just ... "Keep it real"

[andrew_]

matonga, dream_team:

yeah i'm following the usual convention for / commands, and trying to include the misc / commands from most of the popular clients out there (so those of us used to an advanced client can still use the thing )

And I'm following the RFC as closely as I can. Granted the latest RFC for most IRC Daemons is effing huge, there isn't a need (seriously, its effing huge) to support every single numeric or message, but I do at least display the incomming messages, even if there is no action taken by the client. When I decide to implement the scripting/plugins, the scripts will be able to handle those messages that the client doesnt react to natively.

It's cool to see that there is some interest in this. And as such, if you guys have any suggestions please feel free to lend them. Just know that I dont have an apple machine, so the information I go off of from the mac apps is usually in the form of description and screenshots from someone who does

[Dream_Team]

I've got an apple machine, so if you want anything about a specific app, you can ask me

What do you mean by "usual convention for / commands" ? That there will be a context menu that will have some preconf. / commands (Kick, Ban, ...) or just that anything that starts by "/" will be sent raw to the server ?

[matonga]

Checkout http://developer.apple.com/, there is a visual styling guide or something like that. Really interesting (though too large to read in a day).

[andrew_]

Yeah when I was doing the (2nd?) major release of Kapsules back in the day, I tried following that for the UI. All it ended up doing was confusing a lot of Windows users who had never used a mac

[Dream_Team]

Yeah, you should not follow apple style guidlines until you do it for Mac.

Microsoft ones are also intresting but just do it as you find the more intuitive and it will be good. The problem on windows is that you must find a way to implement the menu bar, that isn't in Mac windows because it's on the top (I am sure you can do without one, maybe an systray context menu (maybe too confusing), or other context menus ... but keep it like it already is as mush as it's possible, the current layout rocks.)

[andrew_]

I'm going to be avoiding the menu bar at the top. I have some (imho) good ideas for how to avoid that bar and still allow for easy navigation to features.

[Spas]

Don't suppose this irc client was ever finished?

I would really like a irc client with C# scripting support

[andrew_]

Hey Spas,

I was originally developing this for use in some apps I was working on at my last job. Since I've left, the reasons for this client have kind of evaporated. I did sell a copy of the source to a company at one point and I need to review the terms of that sale. If permitted, I'll likely open the source and post it.

Thanks