I'll admit that I'm pretty hard to please, but I keep being disappointed when software is missing basic everyday functionality.
I want a proper IRC client in the form of a multi-protocol instant messenger.
Goals ∞
- An active project. This is important since those proprietary protocols get changed so as to screw over us Linux users.
- Multi-protocol (IRC, Jabber/XMPP, ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and whatever else)
- IRC automatic NickServ identification and channel auto-join, or a startup script.
- Automatically mark me away when I'm away.
- Make some noise when I'm mentioned by name.
- Make some noise when I'm given a private message.
- Don't be a pig on resources
- Don't be hideously ugly.
-
Be trivial to use or become trivial to use with some configuration (configuration that's backed by human-readable documentation)
With that list, can you say that I'm hard to please? I don't think so.
Wikipedia ∞
Wikipedia to the rescue. Not.
For some reason they've been allowing comparison lists. It's a completely BS thing for them to do, since it's a software review website's responsibility and not an encyclopedia's. But whatever, I found Comparison of instant messaging clients.
But never fear, I would find serious issues with this list. Let's take a look, shall we?
Ok, I'm a Linux user, so I only care about that stuff. I also want IRC. With the brains at Wikipedia, I can get one list or the other, but not both . Nice.
Maybe the German Wikipedia guys can come up with an even more Über JavaScript table sorter which can do this kind of magic. They did come up with the first one, so one can only hope.
The first set of reviews ∞
More... ∞
pork was last updated in mid-2005, and only supports IRC and AIM.
Atymm (Tested 0.5.0) It says that it can do IRC, and it even pretends to do IRC.. but .. really it doesn't. It just fails.
Galaxium (0.7.4.1) Only MSN is available. IRC is in development. Sigh. It'll go on my followup list.
Shit, there is no real software. I guess I have to go back to an IRC-only client, and that means xchat (2.8.6) unless I want to face another misadventure going through IRC clients.
Oh wait, I found some more. A five minute break and I'm continuing on.
Conclusion.. ∞
So. Uh. I'll investigate the beep issue with naim and see if I can get that working. I get a good feeling from it, and since it's console it really gets high praise from me.
I'll be making a new post on my "beep enabling" attempts. Casual searches find the exact opposite advice from what I want. Nobody likes the beep. To be honest, I don't either, so I hope I can enable it selectively for that one xterm (or whatever term I can get this working in)
By the way, this isn't a serious set of reviews. If it were, there would be screenshots. Trust me, if there were screenshots I would be going damned in-depth. I'd probably have some supplementary videos too.. if Linux could handle something like that. Oops, was that my bitterness slipping out? I guess that's a blog for another day.
