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Phoenix1701 · Nov 13, 2002, 11:43 PM

I realize not everyone will agree with what I'm about to say, but hear me out. There is a major problem with IRC on Mac OS X. It's not that there's any lack of native IRC clients -- there definitely is not -- but the problem is that all of them have horrible interfaces.

Let's look at the list:

Ircle. The template from which most of the other clients copied. Spawns windows all over the place; one for each channel you're on, plus the userlist, notify list, inputline, DCC window, channel list, faces list, and probably more I just haven't had time to cram onto my screen. Has a tile feature, which is nice for when I actually want to see all the windows on my screen at once, but becomes entirely useless if I have more than about eight open at once.
Snak. A definite deviation from the Ircle stock, which is a plus. Unfortunately, it's ugly, the response to dragging channel panes is downright weird (because it can mean either move OR resize), and you don't get to choose an orientation for your windows (they all tile vertically). Basically feels like a Mac OS 9 port.
Babbel. Ircle in REALbasic. Complete with perpetual beta cycle. Sorry, Possible, but I just don't see the point.
AkwaIRC. Ooh... shiny. That's about all that can be said about this. It's Ircle, in Cocoa, with no tile feature. No thanks.
JediKnight Apart from the Jedi motif, this really doesn't offer much difference either. It uses drawers instead of windows for things like userlists and inputlines, but in the end you're dealing with a mess of floating windows again.
iRC. The hierarchical list idea is interesting, but only being able to see one channel at once is a pain. And they managed to make a Cocoa interface look cramped and ugly, too. And of course, if you don't want to work within their panel, your other option? Ircle-style, with no tile feature. :/

To be fair, I haven't really looked at the non-OS X native ones, but I haven't seen anything I liked (the Aqua clone of X-Chat looked vaguely promising, but some of the interface elements were hideous). Is it really so wrong to want a dedicated IRC client that doesn't stick out like a sore thumb from the likes of Proteus and Mail? What would such a critter look like? How would it organize its windows so that all of them can be available at once without becoming an explosion of windows or a bunch of illegible strips? And most importantly, what metaphor might it follow to not be like every other client on the planet?

gyc · Nov 13, 2002, 11:46 PM

I just use IRSSI. It doesn't have a GUI, but what do you needd a GUI for when you're on IRC?

MacGorilla · Nov 13, 2002, 11:50 PM

I use BitchX. No GUI, no problem. Very easy to use.

Phoenix1701 · Nov 14, 2002, 04:20 AM

How do you work with multiple channels in IRCSSI and BitchX? And is there a binary installation? (I don't feel like installing fink, but I suppose I will if I absolutely must.) What about color support for different sorts of messages?

eno · Nov 14, 2002, 05:38 AM

xchat is king

McDriver · Nov 14, 2002, 05:51 AM

Originally posted by Phoenix1701:
What would such a critter look like? How would it organize its windows so that all of them can be available at once without becoming an explosion of windows or a bunch of illegible strips? And most importantly, what metaphor might it follow to not be like every other client on the planet?

What about an irc client that looked a bit like chimera with tabs. I would like to have the choice to put the tabs on top, to the right or the left. When you click one tab that channel comes into view. Furthermore it would be nice to be able to have 2 channels open at the same time and this should be customized so you can have the channels side by side or one atop of the other. ie divide horisontally or vertically in the middle. For the more talkative user one could even have 4 channels top left top right bottom left bottom right if you can follow my dizzy thoughts.
So what do you think can this be something? Of course the look of the app should be the same as any osx app.

Millennium · Nov 14, 2002, 10:34 AM

I like ChatZilla, myself. I hope a project comes along to split it off the "main" Mozilla browser, a la Phoenix.

Zimphire · Nov 14, 2002, 11:33 AM

About Snak being "ugly" You can cusomize it's GUI to your liking.

dark3lf · Nov 14, 2002, 12:55 PM

Yeah BitchX

OwlBoy · Nov 14, 2002, 01:37 PM

you could try http://xchataqua.sf.net

-Owl

Phoenix1701 · Nov 14, 2002, 09:01 PM

Originally posted by Zimphire:
About Snak being "ugly" You can cusomize it's GUI to your liking.

Err... I can? Can I change the fact that list views are in Geneva 9, or the fact that the margins between buttons and window edges are inconsistent and don't follow the HIG...? Or the fact that the list headers all use bevel buttons instead of Mac OS X list headers, or the fact that Snak refuses to use focus rings or even live resizing...? I'm not quite sure what parts of the interface you're thinking of, but whatever they are, unless they include things like that (which I highly doubt), they don't do anything to lessen Snak's inherent ugliness in my opinion.

Oh, and about XChatAqua, as I said in my original post, it's promising, but some of the interface elements are rather ugly there as well. What I'm really looking for is a totally new design, not a better implementation of the old ones. McDriver figured out what I'm talking about, although I must say that the interface he describes sounds rather mIRC-like... which may, for all I know, be the best, but I think there's got to be something better...

voodoo · Nov 14, 2002, 10:15 PM

Where can I get a compiled version of irssi for OS X? I don't have developers tools, so I can't compile it myself.

McDriver · Nov 14, 2002, 10:30 PM

Originally posted by Phoenix1701:
McDriver figured out what I'm talking about, although I must say that the interface he describes sounds rather mIRC-like... which may, for all I know, be the best, but I think there's got to be something better...

Hmmmmz thinking so it hurts....imagine a window with tabs on the left where each tab represented a channel and stack those tabs with let's say 4 rows of text in each, which will give you something like 12 channels from top to bottom. Now the thing is that the tab change colour if there is any action in that channel and if it's a personel msg it can have a third colour or maybe pop up another tab. So if you are updated all tabs are eeehhhh transparent and if there is an action in any channel the tab becomes hmmm blue? and if there is a msg (personal) the tab goes like flashing green. Whatever I hope you understand what I mean. (Ellen don't read this, I nicked it from you) It can be done and it can be done good if anyone take the time to expand the thought. Here is a quick sketch of my thoughts

imagine all the quartz gui plz

And here is the idea of clicking a tab

Phoenix1701 · Nov 15, 2002, 04:37 AM

Hmm... interesting, but I was thinking something more like this...

Double-click on a tab, and it retracts up to the top out of your way. Drag it back down, and it acts like a slider bar. Click it once when it's retracted, and it pops back to where it was when you double-clicked it, so you can quickly check on it and then retract it again. Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Yes, I know it doesn't show channel topics. Anything else?

McDriver · Nov 15, 2002, 05:21 AM

looks nicer than my crude sketch

but I want that function I had in mine that you can watch more channels at the same time

Phoenix1701 · Nov 15, 2002, 05:26 AM

That's not hard to do with my model. If you just want to see all your channels, click "Tile All" in the toolbar (or "Tile Expanded" for just the expanded ones). Alternately, you could drag tabs down to other tabs to create new groups, and switch between them by clicking.

We're sort of going different directions with this though, it's true... but your idea does have some advantages. Especially if another click on a selected channel tab would deselect all channels and return them all to being viewed in a tiled fashion like your top screenshot.

dark3lf · Nov 15, 2002, 09:11 AM

I vote for BitchX. Again.

unlinear · Nov 15, 2002, 10:54 AM

Pretty programs are NICE and all, but honestly..

Snak does everything an IRC client has to do. It's carbon, and the buttons on the bar look OS 9 ish. Big deal. It'll probably be changed in future versions.

You CAN overdo the 'pretty interface' angle on OS X, people.

Phoenix1701 · Nov 15, 2002, 02:44 PM

It's not the lack of prettiness I object to as much as the lack of consistent and meaningful feedback of the interface to input. The thing with the pane outlines moving when I'm trying to resize them and then popping back to where I want them when I mouse up drives me absolutely up the wall, and live resizing isn't just pretty -- it's useful. Also, looking like a bad Carbon port makes your application inconsistent with the rest of the interface, using different fonts and sizes and distances and things like that, and it's probably because I'm an interface designer but I think it looks and feels shoddy.
As for BitchX, what do you do if you're in more than one channel?

el_humpo · Nov 16, 2002, 05:11 AM

I agree that IRC on OS X is in a sorry state. Too bad, cuz I like to hang out on openprojects.net.

I've written several small utilities to get familiar with ObjC/Cocoa, and I'm considering starting work on a IRC client.

Personally, I think a tabbed interface is best, but I want standard UI elements, not the weird tabs that Phoenix talked about.

Once I get a solid IRC core class, anyone with a little programming experience could tack on an interface that suits them (maybe even with AppleScript Studio?) The class would be open source, of course. Thoughts?

Phoenix1701 · Nov 16, 2002, 05:38 AM

Cool, el_humpo. I hope it goes well, though I dunno how enthusiastic I can get about AppleScript-driven IRC clients.

The reason I used nonstandard tabs is because they don't behave like standard Aqua UI elements -- IE, double-clicking them collapses them, they can be dragged around, etc. I'm actually not the type for gratuitous custom controls -- I'm an HI designer.

crazyjohnson · Nov 16, 2002, 11:04 AM

XChat! There is a port to OSX, it actually is not bad. But if its not good enough for you just run it on X.

el_humpo · Nov 16, 2002, 07:35 PM

Phoenix1701: I personally would want the interface to be fully Cocoa, of course. I just meant that others could easily create alternative interfaces once a solid object-oriented IRC core was ready. And it would be possible to do with AppleScript Studio, for the code-averse types.

el_humpo · Nov 16, 2002, 11:45 PM

How about something like this:

Multiple channels per window, a window for each server connection.

I know I broke the HIG by having small borders around everything, but it looked too huge otherwise. Thoughts?

asmodeus · Nov 17, 2002, 04:56 AM

I'm looking forward to a release of AquaChat ( http://www.ithinksw.com/forum/index.php?act=SF&f=3 ). Unfortunately, at this stage the it's a bit.. incomplete.

. I currently use X-Chat Aqua, but I hate the UI. A lot.

gorgonzola · Nov 17, 2002, 01:14 PM

Originally posted by Phoenix1701:
How do you work with multiple channels in IRCSSI and BitchX? And is there a binary installation? (I don't feel like installing fink, but I suppose I will if I absolutely must.) What about color support for different sorts of messages?

In irssi, each channel opens in its own virtual window, so opt-1 goes to window 1, opt-2 goes to window 2, etc. There's a statusbar that tells you which windows are active, etc etc. I'm often on 16 or 17 channels at once and it's very easily manageable. You can also do the split-window thing if you want, of course, but I just find this much cleaner, and most people do too, so it's the default.

There isn't a binary available for Mac OS X, so quite frankly the easiest way is to install it with Fink. Once you have Fink installed, make sure you're using the unstable tree, and then just 'fink install irssi'. (The binary trees are not yet ready for 10.2.)

The top and bottom bars look more purple than they actually are partly because of transparency and partly because of compression; each person's nick is in a different color to make it easier to follow, but that's just a script I got off the site and can be disabled or customized; the topic bar shows at the top by default, but it's trivial to remove; all things considered, it's *really* easy to customize the client, and there are a ton of neat scripts available for it that add to its functionality. Check out irssi.org for more.

devNevyn · Dec 15, 2002, 06:36 PM

That interface is just woah-just-soo-cool! It's the perfect interface. Just two things that's needed though:
1. A status bar above each "sub-window" (== a tab bar and one contents field), where the topic could be, and channel flags, and stuff like that.
2. Multiwindows. Maybe right-click a tab bar, choose "Detach", and the bar will detach into a window of its own. Then "Attach > [submenu with windows]".

With a core IRC class, this wouldn't be too difficult.
And again... A core irc class! Then there's gonna be a gazillion of totally different interfaces, and there'll be one for every taste, 'cause it'll be so easy to code!

Ah, you're all geniouses!

kinch · Dec 30, 2002, 09:45 PM

I was pointed at this thread and I followed it with great interest. I'm the author of Snak and I appreciate constructive criticism like Phoenix1701s posts.

After thinking about the issues he brought up I mostly agree, especially with his points about the resize behavior in the tiled view. I hardly ever use that mode anymore after adding the tabbed view so it simply escaped me that it could be improved.

Also, once you're used to the way something works you don't really think about it anymore. The tiled view was added in version 3 back in 1999, when the machines were somewhat slower so that live resizing wasn't as feasible.

The points about the OS 9 look and feel of the UI in some places are also correct but I have put a lot of effort into this area for the upcoming 4.9.

I look forward to more feedback :-)

ShotgunEd · Jan 2, 2003, 05:03 AM

Originally posted by Phoenix1701:
Hmm... interesting, but I was thinking something more like this...

Double-click on a tab, and it retracts up to the top out of your way. Drag it back down, and it acts like a slider bar. Click it once when it's retracted, and it pops back to where it was when you double-clicked it, so you can quickly check on it and then retract it again. Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Yes, I know it doesn't show channel topics. Anything else?

Phoenix, is this the client you are working on with DigiCow? He was chatting to me about it and its sounding quite good. Lets see a beta up here as soon as one is ready

One thing I would say, its probably not a good idea to have the nick in the title bar as you may be logged onto different servers with different nicks.

memento · Jan 2, 2003, 03:11 PM

Originally posted by kinch:
I was pointed at this thread and I followed it with great interest. I'm the author of Snak and I appreciate constructive criticism like Phoenix1701s posts.

After thinking about the issues he brought up I mostly agree, especially with his points about the resize behavior in the tiled view. I hardly ever use that mode anymore after adding the tabbed view so it simply escaped me that it could be improved.

Also, once you're used to the way something works you don't really think about it anymore. The tiled view was added in version 3 back in 1999, when the machines were somewhat slower so that live resizing wasn't as feasible.

The points about the OS 9 look and feel of the UI in some places are also correct but I have put a lot of effort into this area for the upcoming 4.9.

I look forward to more feedback :-)

Good to see that you are watching things here. I've been a registered and happy snak user for a long time. The only thing I would like to see are clickable http addresses. If someone types an address in the channel you can just click it instead of selecting, copying, then pasting it in the browser.

kinch · Jan 3, 2003, 06:54 PM

Originally posted by memento:
Good to see that you are watching things here. I've been a registered and happy snak user for a long time. The only thing I would like to see are clickable http addresses. If someone types an address in the channel you can just click it instead of selecting, copying, then pasting it in the browser.

Snak already supports clickable URLs. If you hold down the command key when clicking on it, the URL will be opened :-)

memento · Jan 3, 2003, 08:15 PM

well then. good job!

Zimphire · Jan 4, 2003, 01:41 AM

kinch has been one of the few IRC coders that actually listen to it's users. Has been since 96.

voodoo · Jan 4, 2003, 10:44 PM

Originally posted by Zimphire:
kinch has been one of the few IRC coders that actually listen to it's users. Has been since 96.

He's also one of the few IRC coders that actually charge for their product. Sorry, but I don't like Snak. The artwork is terrible!! Who did it?? Kevin somebody.

Seriously, I find Snak easy to use, but my heart lies with CLI IRC clients.

Even so, the best GUI IRC client for the Mac is Mozilla. Imagine that!

Zimphire · Jan 5, 2003, 11:27 AM

Originally posted by voodoo:
He's also one of the few IRC coders that actually charge for their product.

When Snak came out there was only one IRC client worth a darn, that was Ircle. Ircle cost money too. Snak has been in development since 96, it is a very mature and stable IRC application. I can't say the same for the other "free" IRC GUI clients. Kent has been coding this for what 6 or 7 years now? The fact he listens to the Snak user's suggestions is well worth the shareware fee. And unlike other sharware authors, you only have to pay ONCE, and you get all the updates from then on for free.

Sorry, but I don't like Snak.

Some people don't, and that is ok�

The artwork is terrible!! Who did it?? Kevin somebody.

Yeah, what a retard. ;-)

[bb]
Seriously, I find Snak easy to use, but my heart lies with CLI IRC clients. [/B]

I just can't stand none GUI IRC clients.

Even so, the best GUI IRC client for the Mac is Mozilla. Imagine that!

Ugh. I can see you liking CLI clients , But Moz's IRC client stinks IMHO.

kdogg73 · Jan 14, 2003, 01:45 PM

I, too, am on a quest for a good IRC program for X. I am, unfortunately, green behind the ears as far as the scripting and basic use of IRC. I am on my last days before I have to register IRCle and I'm weighing my options. I am willing to spend some money for registration, but can't decide between Snak and IRCle. Hrm.....

int69h · Jan 15, 2003, 04:22 PM

I've got some classes that provide an asynchronus implementation of RFC 1459 (basic IRC). I got sidetracked a while back and abandoned development. I'm considering restarting development and need to know what features above and beyond RFC 1459 people can live without. These include things ircII scripting, DCC, mutiple server connections, etc.

I'd post a shot of my prototype, but it's not much to look at. Imagine a TextView for output and a TextField for input.

Bluebomber21XX · Jan 18, 2003, 04:25 AM

What's wrong with ircle?

I've had about zero problems using this app since I started using IRC 5 years ago. It's quick, customizable, and easy to learn.

It's the best IRC client, IMO.

Group51 · Jan 18, 2003, 09:24 AM

Originally posted by OwlBoy:
you could try http://xchataqua.sf.net

-Owl

Wow, this doesn't suck! The interface is a bit frightening (no tool tips!), but it seems to do the bread and butter, and has tabs!

I'm going to spend a little while to read the manual then I'm off!