Creating a good IRC client has been a long term dream I’ve had for many many years. I think I made my first client back in 2001 when I didn’t yet have a good picture of the IRC protocol. The name Goldpanda has been on the project since 2004 or 2005, but I never got quite anywhere despite making pretty good partial solutions here and there. The main problem I had was the lack of Unicode support in VB6. One thing lead to another and I ended up learning tons of things about Unicode, and at the same time learned tons of Windows API, COM etc. as I made VB UserControls.

This year I finally decided it is time to get some direction. I’ve had more attempts on Goldpanda than I have fingers and none of the attempts ended due to lack of skill: I simply had the wrong tool for the goal on mind, lack of time and interest that kept on jumping back and forth between various projects and things. I’m now working on a new attempt with REALbasic. The road will be pretty long and I have a lot to learn on REALbasic: the language in itself is rather familiar, but there are things specific to REALbasic that are still unknown to me. I’m also trying to use one strong feature of REALbasic that simply wasn’t possible with VB6: multiplatform development. I hope that I’m eventually able to release a version that works fine on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. That will eventually mean some level of investment, because the Professional version of REALbasic costs a salty 500 euros (VAT included).

In more technical terms I’ve been spending time on getting the core structure right. Being the first few days on REALbasic this is a great challenge, especially as I do want to get it right. If the core doesn’t go right with all the classes and their interaction and data flow I end up wasting time. I want to get networks, servers, channels and private messages linked in a tight fashion so that when something goes wrong I can do exactly the wanted behavior. On other hand I won’t have a problem with the actual IRC protocol: during the years it has become more than familiar with me. I also know ISupport and identd that are related technologies, often overlooked in other minor scale IRC projects.

On interface side I’m greatly inspired by the good ideas seen on Firefox and Chrome. Thus GUI will be on the minimal side, but powerful. At least that would be the goal.