Colloquy - A polished, easy-to-use IRC client

Mar 23, '04 12:18:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Colloquy imageThe macosxhints Rating:
10 of 10
[Score: 10 out of 10]

For those of you somewhat new to the Internet and iChat-type conversations, here's a brief history lesson. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was one of the first person-to-person chat protocols. It continues in force today, primarily due to its large installed base and its excellent features for managing large group conversations (try to have a 10-person iChat, and you'll see how poorly iChat does at more than one- or two-to-one conversations). I primarily use IRC for two things -- the Geeklog developers channel (#Geeklog on irc.freenode.net), and the macosxhints chat (#macosxhints on irc.krono.net; more info about this is in the Chat link at the top of each page). I've tried a number of modern IRC clients, including xhintschat, ChatX, *censored*x and xchat in X11, etc. All of them worked, but none of them are very Mac-like in any way.

However, yesterday while searching for something completely unrelated, I stumbled on Colloquy (pronounced kä-l&-kwE). Colloquy is a full-blown OS X (Cocoa) application that looks and feels like the best of the Mac world. My IRC needs are light -- I read, I occasionally type, and I'd like to be able to save transcripts for future reference. Colloquy makes it easy to do all of these things, and it looks great in the process. It even comes with about 30 or so "styles" to change the look of the chat interface, and you can apply different themes to different chat rooms, making it easy to tell them apart at a glance. It also seems to support (though I haven't tested) file transfers, and there are numerous nice touches throughout the code -- multiple options for alerts, new window vs. same window for various events, full control over colors and fonts, etc. For all you uber-hackers out there, Colloquy is also AppleScritable, open source, and extensible via plug-ins.

As I mentioned, my IRC needs are basic, so Colloquy may not be right for everyone. But for me, it's the first IRC app I've used that really and truly feels and acts like any other Mac app -- and since it's Cocoa, you have full access to the services menu as well. In short, now that I've found Colloquy, I can't imagine using another IRC client for my basic needs.

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Mac OS X Hints
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