mIRC Co Ltd - (Shareware)
mIRC helps to get in touch with family, friends, colleagues on IRC networks around the world.
mIRC is a communication software that allows to chat with other users through chat rooms hosted within IRC (Internet Relay Chat) servers. This software also allows to connect through proxies and firewalls.
mIRC is a reference in this field because it is one of the first software that allowed such dialogues on the Internet.
The interface is not easy for a beginner and need to know the basics of IRC to be able to use it. By cons, all options are available IRC (much of the mouse).
mIRC is highly configurable, allowing to program aliases, commands and events. It also supports sending and receiving files.
mIRC's default toolbar is now customizable through a /toolbar command. You can add, move and delete buttons, add your own icons, and of course, attach your own commands to them. By popular demand also a treebar has been added. This lists network connections with channels, queries and other open windows, much like the switchbar. It behaves like the switchbar in many ways as well. You can expand and collapse trees, just like you would expect. Right-clicking on an item pops up the usual menu for that window. Right-clicking in an empty area of the treebar pops up a menu with various display options.
The treebar width can be set by dragging the border with the mouse, and jsut as with virtually all other windows the background and text colors can be set in the colors dialog. Just like the toolbar the treebar can be repositioned to the top/bottom/left/right of the main mIRC window!
In the previous version UTF-8 support was added. In this version several UTF-8 related bugs are fixed, including bugs with text wrapping and copy/pasting from UTF-8 "display" or "encode" enabled windows, and bugs relating to the order in which SJIS/JIS and UTF-8 encodings are applied. Much more important is that UTF-8 support has been greatly enhanced in this version of mIRC to allow people all over the world to chat in their own languages, with their own fonts, with a lot less hassle then ever before. To do so support for font substitution/font linking has been added. This allows mIRC to display all characters needed, regardless of the font you are using, assuming you have the required fonts on your system, somewhere. mIRC will try to match font sizes etc. To speed up the process Khaled has implemented his own caching routines to enable fast font/character referencing.
Of course all buggies and most of the other comments and remarks we received after the previous release have been addressed.
Various other changes include:
- better support of XP and classic themes,
- faster re-wrapping of text,
- fixes for various $regsubex() and $regsub() parsing bugs, for a flood protection bug, for some agent speech bug, and for a bug with the find dialog in desktop windows,
- and mIRC now stores servers that were connected to successfully to prioritize future server connection attempts, ...and a lot more.
For experienced users and scripting enthousiasts this new version has heaps of changes and other new thingies to play with. We encourage you to explore the new or improved identifiers, and the new events that have been added.