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Category Archives: Clients

IRCCloud

As most people on IRC these days know, we all use some sort of BNC software. Well, here is the next generation of BNC that you will just want to get your hands dirty with, called IRCCloud.

IRCCloud is a modern, always-connected IRC client that works on mobile devices and modern web-browsers.

You’ll always be connected to IRC, even if your browser is closed and your computer is offline. When you come back to your computer, you’ll be able to easily see and respond to new messages since the last time you checked.

You can use IRCCloud from multiple computers, a record of messages you’ve seen and responded to are automatically kept in sync, so you get a seamless experience every time.

What exactly IS IRCCloud?
To make things simple, it’s an IRC client – IRCCloud connects to IRC servers for you, keeps your connection alive, and stores your chat history. You can access it via a modern web browser, or their mobile apps.

Does IRCCloud act as a BNC/bouncer and stay connected when I go offline?
Yes it does – you will stay connected to IRC even if you shutdown your computer or sign out of IRCCloud.com. This means when you come back, you’ll be able to see what happened on IRC whilst you were away.

Can I connect to an IRC network via SSL?
Yes. Additionally, your web connection to the irccloud.com will always be over HTTPS.

Can I connect to an IRC network that requires a password?
Yes, if you upgrade your account. NickServ login and SASL auth are also supported.

Is it FREE or does it cost something?
There is a free trial version which allows you to connect to up to 2 IRC networks other than IRCCloud’s home network. With the FREE account there is a limitation of being inactive for 2 hours before you are set as inactive and disconnected from any networks you may be connected to.
The PAID version is only $5/month. That includes an unlimited amount of allowed networks and access to connect to passworded servers.

What mobile versions are there?
Currently there is an Android app and an iOS app. They are available in the app stores, and are also open source.

How can I ban an IRCCloud user without banning the entire IRCCloud bouncer?
Information on the host and username scheme that IRCCloud uses is available in their abuse policy.

Why IRCCloud?
IRCCloud was built to solve these three issues:

  • You need to be online and running your IRC software to get messages
  • Being logged in to IRC from two or more computers often causes confusion
  • Most IRC software isn’t a pleasure to use

IRCCloud’s design philosophy is to make things clean, elegant and unobtrusive. IRC software shouldn’t get in your way. They’ve enabled some useful features by default, such as automatically collapsing join and part messages. Conversely, and as a matter of good taste, IRCCloud promises never to add graphical emoticons.

So, Who’s behind IRCCloud?
RJ works on the backend software, which is written in Erlang. An online-music alumnus, he founded Audioscrobbler and Last.fm, where he worked from 2002-2009. He occasionally blogs about Erlang and scalability topics on metabrew.com, and is @metabrew on Twitter.

James works on the interface design, and writes the JavaScript that powers the frontend. Another online music refugee and Last.fm alumnus, he keeps himself busy with various JS/PHP side projects, blogs as jouire.com and tweets as @jwheare

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.