An Open Letter to the Developers of Colloquy
Dear Colloquy Developers,
Today, while chatting away in one of my favorite IRC channels, we came on to the topic of your app, Colloquy. Colloquy, of course, is arguably the predominant IRC client for the Mac, and it, of course, came up in the course of the conversation. It was at this point that I realized under that smooth and shiny exterior, there are many, many, many flaws in the interior; this has prompted me to write this open letter.
First, and perhaps foremost, is the hogging of resources. While users with a great deal of RAM aren’t going to care, those of us without, do. When I used Colloquy, I’d leave it on overnight, only to find my entire system sluggish in the morning. At this point, I was unable to check the messages people left me while I was sleeping because Colloquy would crash out before I could. This was a very bad thing, a very bad experience, and something that has been long-standing. Yet, no fix that I’m aware of has come to solve this.
And speaking of crashing, this seems to be a common occurrence in the world of Colloquy. Connect to a network, join your favorite channel, say something… A bot gives you messages left to you— Bye bye! You just crashed. A little tiny bug in a theme? STOP! It’s crash time. Leave it on over night? Nope, bye. Join too many channels for its liking? See ya later. These are serious issues— some coinciding with every day occurrences— that are in dire need of fixing.
Now, let’s move on to a slightly smaller issue: notices. People who have been on IRC for a while know what notices are, they’re helpful and very useful— but not to Colloquy! No, no, Colloquy hates notices. Sure, you can see them in the console or growl (if you happen to have either open), but when every raw command is going through the console, how feasible is it that you’re going to actually see them? Not very. And even with growl, the occasional notice will get cut off. Not pretty. And this isn’t just a little problem, like just missing a couple personal notices from your friends. No, no. You also miss any notices from chanserv1, nickserv1, memoserv1, and any other bots and services, as well as network-wide notices and wallops. That’s a lot to miss, and honestly, it’s a PITA.
This is sad, sad performance from one of the “best” IRC clients for the Mac, and certainly one of the most popular. It’s not enough to be pretty, this isn’t high school. You guys need to work hard and prove you’re the best.
Sincerely,
Joey Brooks
P.S.: It’s a channel, not a chat room.2
1 These services are server/network dependent, of course, but generic, so I included them in the list. ↑
2 Yes, I know your reasons for using “chat room,” but you haven’t deviated from IRC yet, so why break standard nomenclature? ↑
Karl said...
Joey, you’re one of those old school hardcore IRC folks that use Colloquy and appreciate the design that’s gone into it, but dislike the simplification that went along with that design. I used to be an active developer on Colloquy because I like applications that maintain a concerted effort to have a beautiful and very useable UI.
You may not agree but terms like “channel”, “channel operator”, “server operator”, and friends aren’t really user friendly. So, the first thing in making the protocol more approachable is using more familiar terms that better describe to the user what everything is. While you may argue the semantics of calling a channel, a chat room, it’s much more likely that your mom, sister, and brother will be able to “get” IRC if it’s explained in terms of chat rooms and servers, rather than networks, network nodes, and channels. It’s one of the things about being a mac application you want to get out of the user’s way to let them use the service not give them an entire set of new terms and metaphors to learn before they can understand what’s going on by describing what things mean instead of showing exactly what things are. The user, channel, and server modes are an excellent example of something that is way too arcane to expect to ever see it in a mac application. Also, I should point out that while most people know Colloquy as the premier Mac IRC client, Colloquy doubles as the platforms premier SILC client(http://silc.org) and even supports the ICB(Internet Chat Brigade) protocol all while providing this functionality in the same easy to use UI you’re accustomed to using for IRC.
You cite stability problems, now I don’t know what version you are currently running but if it’s not the latest then please upgrade immediately to the version available from http://colloquy.info?latest. That version should have the latest bug fixes, performance enhancements and user focused features that make Colloquy so popular among mac users. I can say for a fact that I can’t recall the last time my Colloquy crashed, and this sentiment was echoed by those in irc://irc.freenode.net/#colloquy
Performance issues do exist in Colloquy and that can’t be helped at the moment due to the wide assortment of technologies that Colloquy depends on to be such a flexible and fun client. WebKit display areas work great for allowing users to customize their experience but sadly if you load up a Web page with enough content performance does degrade. The good news is that later versions of WebKit push that limit further, the bad news is those later versions of WebKit aren’t standard with the system until Leopard. If you’re so inclined you can always link your current copy of Colloquy to a more recent nightly of WebKit (http://nightly.webkit.org) and see just how much of an improvement you get from upgrading one of the primary frameworks that Colloquy depends on.
May 11, 2007 @ 07:17 PM