48-Hour Days

I’m searching for an IRC client. I thought there would be lots to choose from and, ultimately, one that would fit all my requirements. Sadly, this is not so. It seems that IRC clients have been left to languish or they are brand-new (buggy) applications. This is a review of the ones that I’ve found.

The Requirements

Let’s start off with my requirements.

• Easy-To-Use I’m an IRC newbie. I have already learned some commands, but I’m not completely up on the terminology or exactly how to do everything I may want to do. I would much prefer an application that will let the user enter the commands themselves, but also has menu commands/buttons for the main actions. For instance, it must be exceedingly easy to connect to a server and join a chat room.
• Growl Support I want to see the new posts as they are added, but I don’t want to have to keep the window open and in front to do this. Growl is the perfect solution. A message pops up and I can decide if I want to respond or ignore it. I don’t have to leave what I’m working on unless I really have something to say.
• Menulet/Status Item I’ve become quite the menu item addict these days. Right now I have 13 items in my menu, counting the time and Spotlight. I really would like to have a menu item that will allow me to change my status and, ideally, connect or disconnect from favorite chat rooms. Again, this is all about not having to switch windows if I don’t want to. Also, it would be nice to have a badge on it so that I can see how many new messages there are, or at least if there are new messages.
• Easy To Read I want it to be very easy to distinguish who is saying what. IRC chats can go awfully fast and if everything is one color it starts to melt together into an unreadable mess. I know most of these applications are stylable and you can spend as much time as you want tweaking them to your liking, but I’d much rather have a style that comes with the app that does what I want. I want server communications/messages to be a different color from the chats. It would be nice to have alternating background colors for each message. I might even like the conversation to be separated from the server messages, but I’m not sure.
• Favorites I want a way to store channels that I’ll go back to, but not automatically connect me to all of them. I want the application to remember which rooms I was in when I quit and log me into just those rooms.
• Identification I want to be able to put my username for each server into the application and have it automatically identify me so that I’m not constantly typing /msg NickServ IDENTIFY

Colloquy

This open source application is hands-down most popular of the IRC clients. I can see why. This seems to be the most feature-complete IRC client available for Mac OS X—and it’s free! It is the one that I’ve used the most and the one that I seem to keep coming back to.

Colloquy has a nice interface, though it isn’t quite as polished as some of the others. It comes with a pretty nice array of styles and there are a couple of them that worked for me. You can even have different styles for different chat rooms.

Growl support is there and it is configurable for each type of event, which is nice. You can specify for each event if the notifications are sticky, too. My one complaint is that the notification simply tells you that there is a message, it doesn’t include the message or the username in it. That really doesn’t help me much.

The connections window makes it really super easy to set up the default server connections and to join chat rooms. The regular window where the actual conversations show up also lets you issue commands the old-fashioned way. Nice. You can also get a list of the rooms/channels available on a particular server and filter it! This makes it really easy to find a chat room.

Colloquy allows you to set up multiple connections and mark the ones that should be connected automatically. It will also identify me automatically.

Really, there are very few complaints I have for Colloquy. First, and this is really not their fault, is that it is rather buggy on Leopard. The window will swallow messages and I have to mess around resizing it to get them back. I’m sure this will be corrected soon. Next, there is no menu item. This is the biggest problem for me. Granted, it can be worked around, but I would really love to see one.

That’s it, though. Colloquy just feels rather complete and solid. It is a very nice client and none of the problems are show-stoppers. This is probably the client I’ll stick with.

Linkinus

I first heard of this one in a chat room, ironically.

The application’s main window is very pretty and slick. Definitely, Mac-like. The default style is great at differentiating the different messages. Not only does it color the entire line in a non-glaring way, but it has polished icons that denote what type of message it is.

Linkinus includes a nice menu item, too. It has options for setting your status globally or for each chat room. It also flashes when there are new messages. I had problems with it connecting to rooms I didn’t want to be connected to when I reset my status, but I think I found a preference that will turn that off. It is under Miscellaneous: /away applies to all connects. I think if I turn this off, it won’t connect to rooms to set my status. I haven’t tried this out, yet, though.

However, there are lots of problems. First, the list of users tends to go blank, with only the first user visible. To get the list back, I have to drag the split view to resize it.

Next, there is no readily apparent way to join a chat room. There is no toolbar button for it. There is a “+” button at the bottom of the window, but that adds a new server, with no option for adding a particular channel/room. The File menu only provides the option to cloase a channel, not open it. The Channel menu allows you to create a new room, but not connect to an existing one. The only way I found to actually join a room was to type in /join #room. This seems like a rather glaring omission.

Once you do join at channel, it stays in the sidebar. There is a small bubble next to it that allows you to disconnect from the channel easily. However, clicking on it again actually removes it from the sidebar, rather than reconnect. Right-clicking (or command-clicking) on the channel allows you to re-join it.

There is Growl support and it will include the message and the user who sent it. I very much like this.

It doesn’t identify me to the server automatically, although there is a shortcuts menu that I could add this command to. There are also ways to specify automatic actions, so I could probably tweak the application to do this.

Overall, this is a very new application and it feels more like a release candidate than a 1.1 version. I have a feeling, though, that if I spent enough time with it, I can get it tweaked to my liking. It is possible that the bugs with the split views is a Leopard thing, too. I got a free 1.1 license from MacHeist, but it doesn’t cover any upgrades for 1.2+. However, the application is reasonably priced at $20. There is also a plug-in architecture, which seems promising.

Snak

This is a commercial product (read “not free”). I only tried it for a little bit, but it was a pretty nice client. The interface is utilitarian and not very pretty. There are styles, but none of the built-in ones are very slick. You might be able to develop your own, though. There is no menu item, and no Growl support. That’s about as far as I got with this one. It is available for $29. For me, that is way too much. However, if you are an old-school IRC user, you might really prefer this client.

Conversation

It’s a rather pretty application. However, I’m not crazy about the conversation window. I didn’t see any way to style the window, either. There’s no Growl support. There is no menu item. That’s about as far as I went with this one.

The Conclusion

It’s a toss-up between Colloquy and Linkinus. Colloquy is the more mature of the two, but Linkinus has more of the features I want. Colloquy is free, also. I’m not sure I’m ready to spend any money on an IRC client because I’m not sure how much I’ll actually end up using it. However, I don’t have to make that decision for awhile. Linkinus seems worth some time and I think I’ll spend some with it soon. The nice thing about Colloquy being open source is that I can file enhancement requests and bug reports and, if I had the time, I could even contribute. So, I’ll probably be switching a bit between the two before I settle on one permanently.