Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Way back when I first started using the Internet (way, way back), everything was text-based. I dialed into a phone bank connected to a mux, which then opened a telnet session to a Sun server where I had an account. AIM and Yahoo didn’t exist; you used talk, ntalk, or ytalk to chat with your friends around the country, and you used finger @domain to find out if they were online. Java chat clients didn’t exist either. Instead, IRC was the way to participate in large-group chat chaos and file sharing.

IRC doesn’t seem to be as popular today as it was more than a decade ago, but IRC software has certainly progressed far beyond the text-based clients on the old Sun server. My friends at Your Mac Life have an IRC chat each week (irc.netmug.org, #yourmaclife), and because I enjoy participating, I have the need for an OS X IRC app. Most people seem to know about Snak, but I never wanted to try it because a single-user license is $29. Not that I’m dismissing Snak! If it suits your needs, then by all means, register and enjoy.

There is a very good free IRC app, however, that I almost never hear anything about, and that’s Colloquy. I like Colloquy a whole lot. It very much has the look and feel of an OS X app, and it’s featured enough to keep me happy. Rather than write a dry review of the software, I’d rather post some screenshots of the app in action and the preference panels. I dunno about you, but sometimes the preference panels are as revealing about an app’s function as anything a reviewer would write. At the very least, it should be enough to whet the appetite of anyone who uses IRC. Colloquy is a free download, so if the screenshots appeal to you, it costs nothing to try it.

Here’s an out-of-context capture from this week’s YML chat:

And here are the preference panels: