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Category Archives: Clients

IceChat

IceChat is an open source IRC Client developed by Snerf in July of 2000, first named sIRC. This version still exists and works with very minimum features.

Screenshot:

sIRC Screenshot

It was then recoded from scratch and renamed to VClient in August of 2001 to Icechat.

Screenshot:

VClient Screenshot

To this date, Icechat has now managed to have its on in-built VBS script engine as well as many everyday IRC features. The best feature, It’s FREE! Ice chat is compatible with Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista and also Windows 7, it has also been tested on 64bit XP, Vista and Windows 7.

IceChat also has some very unique features that make it a special IRC Client. A few features to be noted include but not limited to built in emoticons, which can de disabled if the user wishes, a Favorite Server Tree, IRCv3 capabilities and built in virus scanners.

Since the beginning of IceChat, it has now gone through multiple rewrites and is now cross-platform friendly. It now has mirc scripting abilities, VB Scripting and multi-language support. IceChat has now had over 30,000 downloads with a few Beta testers to make sure the release version doesnt have any major bugs.

IceChat is now in version 9, which started in January of 2009 in C# and was yet again a rewrite. The latest release of v9 was released February 9th, 2013.

Icechat currently has its own support channel on the Freenode IRC network at #IceChat

LogSmurf!

LogSmurf is an IRC chat log search engine developed and maintained by Rob Whitney along side his CoFounder, Kamonra. Rob is well known on IRC these days by the nick “xnite”. It was forked from the known Sphider PHP Bot & Search Engine. It has been heavily modified and many more features added into it.

LogSmurf! currently houses over 50,000 logs from 11 indexed servers, just under 40,000,000 keywords that can be used to search the logs including nicknames, phrases, and just common searches, thats over 5 gigabytes of IRC logs since its release at the beginning of July, 2012.

After xnite noticed that people were using pastebin to post and share their IRC logs, he then added in a feature to allow users to have their networks and/or channels indexed and logged by LogSmurf by visiting http://logsmurf.com/get-indexed.php.

If you do not wish to have you network and/or channel indexed but you have some logs you wish to have added to LogSmurf, no problem, simply visit http://logsmurf.com/submit.php, post your logs, but read the rules before you do. There are filters that will cancel out any and all credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.

If you need any help with LogSmurf!, there is a public IRC chat in which you can join and ask questions or give suggestions by clicking HERE.

KiwiIRC

KiwiIRC is a web-based, open source IRC Client that was started around two years ago by Darren Whitlen, known as prawnsalad on IRC, as a “Can I do this” type of project. It was abandoned for a few months due to lack of time. After those few months passed Darren had some other developers who grew an interest into the project and jumped in helping release it once again.

The goal of the KiwiIRC client is to allow users without IRC knowledge to be able to communicate with each other on a simple to use web-based irc client. Aside from the client being web-based, it can also be embedded onto your chatsite and used for your personal IRC network. For for information on this please see http://kiwiirc.com/embedding.

Besides the above facts, it now has a Google Chrome extension, as well as a Firefox application, and it is compatible with your Android/Apple phones and tablets.

KiwiIRC has plans for the near future to have a fully functional admin web-panel to help the admin/staff of an IRC network to maintain and control the users as well as change KiwiIRC configuration options, without having to manually edit the files.

Screenshots:

KiwiIRC

The open source project can be found at http://github.com/prawnsalad/kiwiirc.
For more information regarding KiwiIRC, please visit http://www.kiwiirc.com

Colloquy 2.4 For OS X Released

The Mac OS X IRC client Colloquy just got updated to version 2.4.

The new release is Lion-only and now supports fullscreen IRCing, has SASL support and the dock gets a badge when there are unread private messages and highlights.

The integrated “Colloquy Bouncer”, which provides bouncer capabilities to the mobile client counterpart, has had a memleak and a bug fixed that would prevent it from properly quitting.

The handling of netsplits has been improved and excess flood issues on freenode have been fixed. CPU and memory consumption has been reduced and Growl is now supported on 64bit platforms.

 

Are you using Colloquy on OS X? Tell us about your experience with it in the comments!

 

The full changelog and the download for Colloquy 2.4 can be found here.

 

IRCjr – An IRC Client for DOS

There are IRC clients for every platform and every OS – wait, really every platform, every OS?

 

Lets see:

Windows? More than you can handle..

OS X? Sure

Linux/UNIX? Of course

 

…and more – i’ll spare you listing every platform there’s an IRC client for.

 

But.. what about DOS you say? Yes, yes – there is one: IRCjr.

 

It’s not only a proof-of-concept but is a fully-featured client. It supports CTCP messages such as /me and /version, has timestamps, logging to disk, a user-configurable scrollback buffer and supports every display from MDA/monochrome up to VGA resolutions and colors.

 

DOS IRC Client IRCjr running in DOSBox

DOS IRC Client IRCjr running in DOSBox

 

As you can see from the screenshot it sports a split-screen layout and according to its website it’ll run even on “the oldest 8088 based systems” from DOS 2.1 and newer.

 

Being in multiple channels and private messages at the same time is no problem – IRCjr is even compatible with multiple monitors, although it can only use one at a time.

 

Since DOS is pretty much obsolete these days and being asked about the reason why he wrote a program for a dead platform the programmer, Michael  Brutman, said that he had rediscovered the fun in retro computing and since all TCP/IP stacks for DOS sucked, he wrote his own and the first application he developed for it was IRCjr.

 

One of the main concerns while programming was stability and according to Michael Brutman it’s really stable and can be left running even in very busy channels such as #ubuntu on freenode without problems.

 

On the feature-side he said that he’s looking to bring multi-server support and maybe mIRC color codes into the client but sadly Unicode support is pretty much ruled out as most of the old hardware can’t load fonts.

 

So if you’re a retro computing enthusiast and addicted to IRC – give it a go and let us know what you think about it in the comments!

 

More details about the setup, configuration and capabilities of IRCjr can be found on the IRCjr website.