[WBG4]

I am willing to make us an irc channel and a stand alone easy connect app. I like freenode my self. What cha all think?

[Luca]

I think it would be cool, but we should determine if there's any interest first. I'm interested but maybe some of the people here would prefer AIM's slowness .

[Luca]

I've decided to add a poll by posting a new topic and then merging them. Hopefully it works.

EDIT: Yay, it worked! Okay, I tried to keep the poll simple. Basically narrowed it down to three possibilities - whether you'd actually be interested in IRC, whether you're interested in chatting but not over IRC (in which case you should probably suggest something else), or if you are not interested in chatting at all.

For those of you who aren't geeks (or for geeks who have been living in a dark hole with no internet access or outside contact for the past 15 years), IRC is a method of online chatting. Whereas AIM and MSN focus on peer to peer chats, where you chat directly with one other person, IRC focuses on chat rooms. You connect to a server, join one of the many rooms on that server, and chat with people. It can be intimidating at first because you have to know the server name, channel name, and a few text commands (like /join and /nick). Once you get the hang of it, though, it's very easy, and far preferable to the more commercialized chat services. As a few of us experienced earlier, AIM's chatting is pretty bad. Sometimes it works okay, but in our case it had a huge amount of lag that kept everyone from communicating with each other.

IRC is a time-tested protocol. You will not experience lag, and if T&A writes a specialized IRC app for connecting directly to the AppleNova channel, you won't have to learn anything special. Just open the program and start typing.

[WBG4]

Nice thing about it is you have control, you can kick people who are being asses, and ban people who need banning and have a topic.

[WBG4]

Also if you think irc is going to be hard, it's not. The stand alone app makes it brain dead simple

[Luca]

By the way, T&A, thanks so much for the offer! I hope we can put our past differences behind us and just focus on this project. It would be really cool if we could get regular AppleNova chats going, without that terrible AIM lag.

[WBG4]

You're most welcome
Yes, we can do that.

Freenode is a great network, you will also find mac addict's irc chat on there and it is the network for open source things. Cool place. Also unlike some places it is not full of bots and crap and is not too prone to splits and the like.

[Gargoyle]

Cool idea!

If I am online then normally xChat is connected to freenode and quakenet. What chans do you idle the hours away in. I am normally on #gentoo-server.

Edit: I have updated my startup prefs, so from now on if I am online I'll be in #applenova on irc.freenode.net

[Windswept]

Originally Posted by Luca I think it would be cool, but we should determine if there's any interest first. I'm interested but maybe some of the people here would prefer AIM's slowness .

Luca, my love,........

[Luca]

So what you're saying is that...

1) I am your love (e.g. you love me)
2) You want to lick me five times
3) Afterward, you will laugh nonstop

Correct?

[Windswept]

Originally Posted by Luca So what you're saying is that... 1) I am your love (e.g. you love me) 2) You want to lick me five times 3) Afterward, you will laugh nonstop Correct?

Okay, Luca.

Here's the deal. You talked about people 'preferring' that annoying lag-time.

People = *me*.

So, I stuck my tongue out at you repeatedly.

Then I laughed, because I was just kidding around.

And, yes, Luca, I *do* love you. You are very sweet...except when you are correcting my spelling (it's; its), or when you are calling me a strumpet.

Okay?

[Luca]

Of course I love you Carol!

I just have a somewhat dry or slow sense of humor...

You are cute!

[WBG4]

i could have a beta for the app in probably 15 min. Do you want brushed metal or aqua?

[WBG4]

For those of you who are voting no, i'm just wondering why?

[staph]

Originally Posted by T&A i could have a beta for the app in probably 15 min. Do you want brushed metal or aqua?

Aqua.

AQUUUUUAAAAAA!

[LoCash]

I just normally don't like the IRC interface. It's cryptic and not pleasurable. But then again, I only ever used ircle or BitchX. If you can build a client that has a simple, inviting UI, I'm all for it. Maybe one branded for AN and you'd have my vote. Show me something

[WBG4]

http://www.geekd.org/mafirc/ it will look something like that but in aqua. I made this one too. You hit connect and it connects

[Luca]

Yeah, just because most IRC apps have horrible, horrible interfaces doesn't mean IRC itself is bad. It's easy to create a good client with an intuitive interface. For some reason, though, IRC junkies seem to prefer cryptic and stupidly designed interfaces.

I admit it turned me off from IRC a while back. I remember a chat room I used to attend a while back, and I sure complained when the people there decided to move to IRC instead of AIM. But now that I've learned more about IRC it really is better for chatting. Get a good client and it's not bad at all. I would recommend iRC (note the capitalization) for Mac OS X users - it's the simplest and most intuitive one available, with a nice OS X native interface. You can download it here.

Like I said... if you want to say that IRC is a bad idea, please suggest a better alternative (thanks LoCash). As far as I can tell, AIM is pretty much useless for multi-person chat, so I don't know what else there is short of making everyone get an MSN Messenger account, and I have a feeling that will be much harder to do than it would be to get everyone to download a specially made AppleNova IRC client.

[WBG4]

I'll try to get something up by saturday night

[WBG4]

Here is the first beta. Let me know what you think. I woke up early (I just got accepted to my top choice for college so i am like hella happy and excited) so i decided to work on it before work.

[Marcellus Wallace]

I think this is terrific!

[WBG4]

Thank you we need a different dock icon though

[staph]

Looks good.

[Marcellus Wallace]

Yes.. I think the one you've used now is a very happy one nevertheless...
Nice if it would be a bit closer to the 'tech'-feel that AN is using now as its background-pic... would love to help you a bit with that or do a suggestion... only if you'd appreciate that ofcourse.

[WBG4]

If you want to help i'd love that. I did not write the original source and know enough to make it work for other channel ect, but i don't really know that much code. PM me or find me in irc. Thank you for your kind words

[WBG4]

I will be in their idling but probably will not be on as i will be at work in my mac lab till 4ish. Feel free to sop by anyway

[spotcatbug]

Originally Posted by T&A For those of you who are voting no, i'm just wondering why?

Personally, I like having only one chat client running on whatever machine I'm using. Everybody I chat with (either one-on-one or in a room) uses AIM. I'd just prefer to stick with only iChat on my Mac and only the AOL client on my PC, when it comes to chatting.

[WBG4]

I gottcha. My big gripe about aim chatrooms (other then it being AOL and laggy and shit like that) is i can't join from adium reliably

[Paul]

Re: dock icon... see if murbot still has that flaming HD icon from his infamous thread way back when...

[Brad]

Mind posting the source code for review? I certainly don't want to endorse something when I don't know if it'll be stealing users' information or killing their parents or playing fetch with their dog or something equally insidious.