IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Peter “zed” Železný, the author of the popular GPL’d XChat IRC client announced that a new version of it is available for download.

XChat 2.8.8 adds a whole host of bugfixes and stability improvements to the already pretty stable IRC client. Users of the freenode IRC network may find a particular bugfix that works around a problem with auto-joining keyed channels on ircd-seven interesting.

The default server list has been expanded with the addition of 4 new networks and the tray icon notifying of new messages, highlights and such has seen a refresh. Growl-style notifications can now be set to be shown for a certain length using the /set input_balloon_time option.

The KDE IRC client Konversation released version 1.3-beta1 this weekend which brings many changes to the table compared to the last release, version 1.2.3.

With this new version, Konversation now depends on KDE 4.3 and Qt 4.5 and also has gotten a few “interface tweaks, new keyboard shortcuts and many bugfixes [to] round things out” according to the announcement on their homepage.

The most exciting new feature Konversation 1.3 brings to the table is called “DCC Whiteboard” which brings “collaborative drawing – think two-player Kolourpaint – to IRC”.

To get an idea how this is implemented and how it looks like, see the screenshot below:

A new version of the Android IRC client AndChat went live just yesterday, so lets have a look:

AndChat Channelview

Version 1.2.9 brings a few feature additions, a fix for a crash bug on “selecting [a] name in user list screen” and various other small improvements.

Unspecified issues with orientation changes have been fixed and the code regarding the scrollback buffer has been worked on to prevent accidental loss of it on pressing the D-Pad. To indicate new messages that currently are not in view, AndChat now displays blue arrows and the scrollbars have been hidden to save some screen estate and only show up when the text-area is pressed longer.

Developer Sputnick of the Quassel project just posted an announcement for version 0.6.1 of their IRC client.

Quassel IRC client Logo

In case you wonder where the announcement of 0.6.0 went, he writes that they skipped it because “shortly after tagging, we’ve discovered two serious bugs in that version. One could make the monolithic client try to select the PostgreSQL backend rather than SQlite; the other would lead to a crash on startup in some setups”.

In the announcement, he cites the following as the most notable new features:

HelLViS69 of the KVIrc project just announced that release candidate 3 of their IRC client in the 4.0 branch is available for testing.

The changelog sounds pretty interesting and the client seems to have gotten lots of new features and more than 200 bugs have been fixed since RC1.

In the announcement, developer HelLViS69 lists the new features in this build, such as an “automagical wizard to create theme packages, the new class editor (no more classes in aliases!), the smart nick coloring which permits to select your favourite fore/background color”.

But how about something revolutionary? Developer CtrlAltCa has something in store for us: