Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC & SILC client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.
I use Colloquy every day and by and large I'm happy with it - the core interface is clean and intuitive, it gets the Cocoa feel right, and eschews a lot of the unnecessary features that get in the way with other IRC clients. But there hasn't been a single update in the 5 months I've been using it despite frequent and irritating known bugs: such as the crashers other users have mentioned and a particularly annoying one that makes channel windows appear to be completely empty until you type "/reload style" or rejoin the channel.
Besides the bugs, many parts of the app are still undercooked. The default style has a distracting fixed background image, and removing it is complicated by bugs in the style modification window (not to mention that removing it seems to trigger the aforementioned empty-window bug). The transfers window gives little control over transfers - if a transfer hangs (which happens a lot due to the pickiness of DCC), it's difficult to cancel it and it can interfere with retransfer attempts. Selecting and copying text from IRC into other applications is fiddly: Colloquy will often ignore or screw up selection attempts unless you have careful aim, and it will paste usernames as Colloquy-only links broken across several lines unless pains are taken to paste without formatting. The peripheral parts of the interface are a bit of a ghetto - the buddy list appears to have no way to remove buddies (or indeed much use at all), the connection window is obscure to find and use when you need it, the menus have options for controlling the drawer even though the drawer interface mode is disabled by default. And so on.
All of these are nitpicks, but they're things that irritate me daily. I want to continue using Colloquy and have donated, but if there's no sign of active development I will eventually move to Linkinus or another maintained client - despite the core experience being less elegant.
After using this application a little more I'm very disappointed with bugs on it. I am very heavy user of EnterTheGame network and Colloquy completely fails int his server. The ops/voices aren't detected as they should when you join a channel. Once there anyone that gets oped/voiced gets displayed correctly but everyone else has teh @ or + on their names and sorting is bad.
Also there's a horrible bug that everytime I attempt to change topic or try to remove a ban from the GUI, BAM whole thing comes crashing down :/
Nice interface, but it's a resource hog and completely collapses when you're connected to channels with high volumes of chat. Needs optimization and fine tuning.
Great app, I've tried all of the Mac IRC apps and this is by far the best. However, I do find the pop-up notices annoying when you join a server/channel, and you don't seem to be able to disable them? Can anyone help?
Where do I store my nick prefs?....it's mildly annoying having to re-enter this info for each server....it would be better to have this in the 'Preferences' section.
Apart from this, a good app that at least allows painless file transfers via the "allow passive" checkbox :D
It's new unifed UI that matches 10.4 Mail.app isn't as good as the old one. Putting the users in disclosure list under each channel is a poor idea, since you can't see any of your channels below it if the channel open has any significant number of users. A nice thought, but your tabs were awesome before and the drawer had better usability (though I dislike drawes in general).
THE irc client for OS X. Although like other members have said, the beta builds are where its at. Most bugs have been worked out, and the betas seem to be comming out monthly.
13 Opinions:
Personally I really dislike the Colloquy UI.
I use Colloquy every day and by and large I'm happy with it - the core interface is clean and intuitive, it gets the Cocoa feel right, and eschews a lot of the unnecessary features that get in the way with other IRC clients. But there hasn't been a single update in the 5 months I've been using it despite frequent and irritating known bugs: such as the crashers other users have mentioned and a particularly annoying one that makes channel windows appear to be completely empty until you type "/reload style" or rejoin the channel.
Besides the bugs, many parts of the app are still undercooked. The default style has a distracting fixed background image, and removing it is complicated by bugs in the style modification window (not to mention that removing it seems to trigger the aforementioned empty-window bug). The transfers window gives little control over transfers - if a transfer hangs (which happens a lot due to the pickiness of DCC), it's difficult to cancel it and it can interfere with retransfer attempts. Selecting and copying text from IRC into other applications is fiddly: Colloquy will often ignore or screw up selection attempts unless you have careful aim, and it will paste usernames as Colloquy-only links broken across several lines unless pains are taken to paste without formatting. The peripheral parts of the interface are a bit of a ghetto - the buddy list appears to have no way to remove buddies (or indeed much use at all), the connection window is obscure to find and use when you need it, the menus have options for controlling the drawer even though the drawer interface mode is disabled by default. And so on.
All of these are nitpicks, but they're things that irritate me daily. I want to continue using Colloquy and have donated, but if there's no sign of active development I will eventually move to Linkinus or another maintained client - despite the core experience being less elegant.
After using this application a little more I'm very disappointed with bugs on it. I am very heavy user of EnterTheGame network and Colloquy completely fails int his server. The ops/voices aren't detected as they should when you join a channel. Once there anyone that gets oped/voiced gets displayed correctly but everyone else has teh @ or + on their names and sorting is bad.
Also there's a horrible bug that everytime I attempt to change topic or try to remove a ban from the GUI, BAM whole thing comes crashing down :/
Nice interface, but it's a resource hog and completely collapses when you're connected to channels with high volumes of chat. Needs optimization and fine tuning.
IRC + Mac-style.
this is simply the best IRC app for Mac ever!
Great app, I've tried all of the Mac IRC apps and this is by far the best. However, I do find the pop-up notices annoying when you join a server/channel, and you don't seem to be able to disable them? Can anyone help?
Where do I store my nick prefs?....it's mildly annoying having to re-enter this info for each server....it would be better to have this in the 'Preferences' section.
Apart from this, a good app that at least allows painless file transfers via the "allow passive" checkbox :D
It's new unifed UI that matches 10.4 Mail.app isn't as good as the old one. Putting the users in disclosure list under each channel is a poor idea, since you can't see any of your channels below it if the channel open has any significant number of users. A nice thought, but your tabs were awesome before and the drawer had better usability (though I dislike drawes in general).
THE irc client for OS X. Although like other members have said, the beta builds are where its at. Most bugs have been worked out, and the betas seem to be comming out monthly.
The latest beta builds are worth trying. A little buggy (as you'd expect) but loads of significant UI improvements.
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