MacMerc.com: iChat Tips, Tricks and Hacks looks at the generally disappointing bag of addons that have appeared for iChat, a topic I’ve bemoaned in the past.
I recently started dabbling in IRC a bit again, and started with mIRC, a geeks’ client if ever I saw one, and have settled, for now, on the considerably more Macish Fire, a multi-protocol chat client that supports AIM and IRC as well as MSN Chat and whatever else.
It’s particularly clever in its’ implementation of IRC chat channels. Create a buddy, name it after the channel, enter the channel’s settings, and that’s it.
Given that iChat is a product that’s been encumbered (and enabled) by AIM-related contracts, I can understand the lack of multiprotocol support from Apple. But given that, as MacMerc covers, others have written plugins to enfixen the wee bairn, might we not expect multiprotocol plugins to raisie their wee sparklin’ eyes?
(I have no idea what the heck is going on with the pseudo-Scots grammar and vocab. None whatsoever, and I further disclaim all responsibility.)
At work, I’ve been trying out Trillian, in between swearing fits concerning documentation and arbitrary dialog-entry relationships on the part of the Win XP team. It seems to work just fine, and the swooshy-yet-somehow-not-terribly-obtrusive eyecandy it comes with is neat too.
I am not a fan of Trillian. MirandaIM, on the other hand, is an outstanding piece of work.
Thanks, Dan, I’ll check it out.
I’ve been using Colloquy recently for my irc client, now that it supports docking behavior. For windows, I’m still an xchat user for IRC on public networks.
I toyed with fire for a while but found it unstable for the volume of irc I do – that was a goodly number of revs ago, however.
Fire not so good. I use it only for MSMessenger these days.
Colloquy good, pretty and has proper attitude. I agree with Eric that Fire no good for IRC at volume.
I think mixing IRC clients with latter day IM clients doesn’t quite work, there’s a different set of dimensions.