Homebrew App Preview: wIRC

Posted By: Tim Carroll Wednesday, November 4, 2009 5:23:41 AM

Before Twitter, before Live Messenger, before Yahoo!, before Skype and before ICQ, there was one instant-messaging service to rule them all: Internet Relay Chat. The now-ancient technology was first created in 1988, and to this day remains the favoured chat service of 'net nerds globally. IRC has been especially useful in bringing together the webOS developer community - even Palm are now officially hanging out on the webOS channels - and thus, it was inevitable that a native webOS client would eventually be released.

Enter wIRC, the ~~brain~~ love child of WebOS Internals developers Ryan Hope, Brandon VanBelle and Eric Gaudet. Powered by a native C background service and sporting a delectable Mojo front-end, wIRC is already mightily impressive even in its' current 0.0.0.0...... .0.1 alpha iteration. Read on for some sexy screenies and fabulous features!

As mentioned in the intro, wIRC is a two-part package: it requires the installation of an underlying background service (coded in C) and the Mojo front end. Upon launch, you're greeted with the server list. Tap the plus icon in the lower-right corner to add new servers to the list, and then use the gear icon to edit preferences and the plug icon to connect.

I'm a sucker for lots of customization in my apps, so I absolutely love that wIRC gives to option to pick your preferred font size, and whether or not to display chats with fixed colums for nicks and messages or a simple left alignment for everything. You'll also note that you can pick between the default Palm theme, or the much-more-attractive Palm Dark theme, for your cards.

Additionally, you can toggle whether or not wIRC will use the built-in webOS "Smart Text Engine", which auto-capitalizes words and fixes common spelling mistakes. Personally, I hate the damn thing - I prefer to correct my own words, rather than have a machine do it for me. (I look forward to the day when I can rip it out of webOS wholesale.)

Speaking of cards, wIRC allows you to open as many as you like, to connect to as many channels and servers as your heart desires - as you can see in the screenshot above (taken on the webOS emulator).

So what's missing? Quite a bit so far: the complete list of IRC commands is far from fully supported, and there are some nagging bugs throughout. But considering that the whole shebang is still in version 0.1, it's looking very, very good thus far. Your correspondent can't wait to get his hands on the final version.

Heck, I'd even pay for it.

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