KARINA In my opinion the best IRC client on OS X, it's stable and has an excellent ui (if you've ever used Vision under BeOS it's the same design). I had been using XChat-Aqua for a long time and to it's credit, it's an excellent, feature rich client, however it is quite slow, can be quite buggy and tends to lag quite a way behind the official XChat releases at times. iRC is superior in its handling of multiple channels over multiple networks to all other MacOS X clients I've tried (and I've tried all the ones currently on macupdate), it manages to keep everything laid out in one nice little window, with your server/channels laid out on the left (you can also use tabs, but you'll run out of space if you use a high number of channels.) due to this layout, you can easily manage around 10 server connections with around 5 channels each if need be. Personally I use 4 networks with a total of ussually around 15 channels and XChat-Aqua is the only other native client I found that could handle this in a useable manner. There are a few tiny bugs here and there, but nothing that really sticks out as irritating and the client itself seems to be extremely stable. My thoughts to the developer (if you ever read this). - Don't use the smiley faces by default for now, the icons are a touch too big and kinda cheesy, look at Yahoo IM for some styling ideas and make sure they look ok on a black background too. - Think about implementing something like a "style.rc" file which holds colour settings, strings and possibly font settings, allowing the user to flick between say 5 or so predefined styles and add, save and download additional ones. - Simplify the toolbar so it takes up less real estate by default. - Make sure every colour used in the interface can be customized with ease. Overall Mice iRC is solid and feature rich and I don't hesitate to recommend it. (Version 0.12) |