For the past 10 years I’ve been coding IRC clients on and off as sort of a hobby. Only a couple has been released in alpha, but I usually started redeveloping them from scratch at some point. And here we are again. Nimbus.IRC (originally Tedd.IRC) is the working name of yet another IRC client I’ve written. This time I’m fairly happy with how things looks under the hood and thought I’d start releasing alpha versions.
I’ve set up a web page at http://dev.tedd.no/NimbusIRC/ which contains some information and eventually a download link. I’m working on removing some small annoyances and can hopefully release a version before end of this week.
Status right now is that the IRC client is working, but has bugs and lacks some features. But it has all the basic stuff and would for some people be enough.
The client is written as modules. I have a Common library and a GUI .exe which kickstarts all the modules. This means that any feature can either be removed, replaced or added simply by deleting/adding modules. It uses .Net modules, so you can write modules in almost any language. C++, C#, VB.Net and JavaScript to mention a few.
I’m also using Windows Presentation Foundation for some of the objects. The plan is to move it to 100% WPF, but that is not important at this point. WPF lacks MDI windows so I’d have to implement my own, so a decision was made to go for a WinForm/WPF comination for initial version. The GUI is just modules, so Silverlight and Console (Linux for example) clients are not out of the question.
The plan for the client is to bring a people a richer IRC experience than the gray old mIRC does today. Simply put: Ease of use, nice looks and useful features. But the most important aspect is to get a plaform that can be used to further evolve IRC. By writing this client so modular I hope it will be possible to reuse components for bots and other clients so that we will get a diversity of IRC clients and utilites that are up to date.
Are you a .Net developer and want to help then let me know… Here are both big and small tasks that suits all skill levels… 🙂
Here are a couple of screenshots. Its not great looking yet, that will come when I add skin support and fix up the GUI a bit. Focus until now has been on stuff under the hood. 🙂
