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Wow long time

Zach Thibeau's picture
Submitted by Zach Thibeau on July 25, 2012 - 8:57am

Been a couple of years since I posted a blog post here at portableapps.com, so I guess I'll change that up a little.

Most of you all know I'm the main developer of PChat and PChat Portable, things are a little slow at the moment and I do apologize for that fact, been trying to balance a life, coding and well just everything in general (doesn't mean I'm giving up on PChat though, heck no I'm getting ideas on improving things :P).

Among the things I am planning on are the aforementioned improvements for PChat mainly a redesigned PChat 2 interface using a different irc engine with a new set of Human Interface Guidelines inspired by the elementaryos.org team. This combined with several elements from wxwidgets toolkit widgets like AUI will provide a visually nice looking app that's easier on the eyes but also maintain simplicity in style and ease of use.

A key point is that it may be incompatible with old settings but as long as the old settings are backed up I'll work on a migration wizard that will import the old settings into the new format. Plugins for the next version will not work right away but it will be a strong point in making old plugins compatible with PChat 2. Another thing I'm looking forward to is buying an iMac whether it's used or new and the main reason for this decision is that PChat strives to be multiplatform, and while it compiles and runs on linux and windows and quite possibly various bsd systems, it never had a mac binary and I'm trying to change that. As we all know Apple computers never tend to be... cheap and some of you guys may mention hackintosh as an alternative, in my opinion the easiest solution is to have real apple hardware legitimately, either way I do hope to have a mac binary available in the future.

Anyways I blabbed on long enough, thanks for reading and keep looking at PChat's development blog at pchat-irc.net/blog for more information and updates.

Comments

Nice Smile
It just looks nice and clean (and a bit mac-ish).
I really like Jupiter and am looking forward to Luna.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

Zach Thibeau's picture

well clean is what I'm striving for and a new irc engine is in need, the current xchat code base is pretty much dead, no new developments and was a pain to work with, the current engine I'll be using is called libircclient which has all the needed features dcc etc but in a much smaller package making PChat that much smaller in size but still maintain near the same functionality

your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau