One day an old sage said that what is the most important is to « release early, release often ». Even if I don’t rely comply with the first part, at least I can comply for the second . So here is the first alpha version of Circ dubbed 0.1-alpha1 : « some Mac users should go to hell ». I made two tarball versions, a buggy autooled-based one and a binary only one. For the autools I say it’s buggy because it asks for unnecessary dependencies (I reported the bug to MD folks so it should be fixed in a couple of day/week). The real dependencies are just Nini and Gtk# (and Mono of course ). I really recommend you to use the binary version if you want simplicity. To grab the tarballs just go there : http://netherilshade.free.fr/circ/#download.

In this release Circ supports :
- connecting server and joining chans with a multi-tabbed interface.
- possibility to change nick (the UI might not update though ).
- show connected users and topic (user are added when they connect but the disconnection part is not yet handled).
- basic nick auto-completion.
- highlight support with window blink.
- timestamps for message.
- plugins support (scroll down).

They are still a lot of bugs and things that don’t work (some part of the UI does nothing or are buggy) but well it’s not an alpha for nothing .

About plugins, I mostly stabilized the API so the plugins interface should be mostly usable. As a proof of concept I made two quick plugins for example purpose : one which connect Circ automatically to the default channels you set in X-Chat (buggy on Mono though, IMHO it’s a bug in fields capture in anonymous methods) and one which change your quit message to a fancy ones who show the number of days/hours/seconds… before the big Posix bug (I know it stupid but one of my friend requested it so ).

I still didn’t implemented the UI I want for the users to connect/join/quit servers/channels and thus I implemented three command in the CommandProcesser (which you can use in your plugins too). The CommandProcesser is a component where you can post special command assorted with delegate callbacks that get called when the user actually type your command with the arguments the user supplied. The three commands that you should know are :
- « /c irc.yourserver.org yourNick » : this command connects you to a server with the specified nick.
- « /j #yourchannel » : this command makes you join the specified channel.
- « /n yourNewNick » : use this command to change your nickname.