OH CRAP, who let the Wookie out!

Date 19-May-2007 0:42:44
Topic: Software News


WookieChat 2.6 is now available for AmigaOS 3.x, AmigaOS 4.0.. and now also MorphOS and AROS too! The idea of being on both Amiga and Amiga-like systems had slowly been growing on me. Using AmiDevCpp and with the help of several users on freenode #morphos and #aros, I was able to port Wookie over in only a few days!

The major addition in this release is the optional listview-style tabs system, a new way of displaying channels and private tabs (under the nicklist). It's an alternative to the usual button-style tabs, especially for the power users who often have over 10 or 20 tabs open at once. If you prefer the button style tabs, dont worry, they're still there and are used by default. These two modes can be switched on the fly (in the Main Settings window), so you can have a play and see what its all about.

Be sure to check out the weird little features documented in power_users.txt, which you may or may not find interesting. :P

There are still a few glitches with this release which I'm finding quite impossible to iron out. The serious one is that some MorphOS users seem to freeze up sometimes when switching between tabs using the new tab system. Also, the colours get messed up under ZUNE after accessing MUI Settings (but colours can be reset by opening and closing the Colour Settings window). And lastly, some MorphOS users experience loss of all colours if they attempt to configure the pens. But, I thought I'd release what I've done so far (despite the glitches), because I'm probably going to wind down development now, as the client is mature enough for my own needs.

Download it from: WookieChat homepage, aminet, os4depot.net

Full list of changes in version 2.6..

  • Executables are now provided for AROS, MorphOS, as well as AmigaOS3.x/4.0
  • New tab system. Optionally, you can display tab names in a listview under the nicklist, instead of using buttons along the bottom of the window. This system is ideal for users with lots of tabs open. Toggle this setting at "Main Settings > General"
  • Added two new configurable pens for the listview-style tabs system.
  • You can comment out lines in your Connect Scripts with ; at the beginning of each line
  • Made sure all commands in "Connect Scripts" operate in the right tab when connecting to a few servers simultaneously
  • Tab memory and objects used to be freed after closing WookieChat, but now I'm starting to clean up memory as soon as a tab is closed. Very handy on machines with small amounts of RAM (like my 6mb A1200!)
  • More memory leaks plugged. the DCC transfers and chat sessions are now cleaned up on exit.
  • Added sanity checks to the gethostbyname() calls, so that if your address value is invalid for some reason, it wont crash
  • If Wookie is unable to automatically obtain your own address for use in establishing DCC connections, you can now manually specify an address yourself in the prefs. (Main Settings > DCC)
  • When you connect, the "001" server message is displayed in full and in the root tab. This message contains your hostname, or what the IRC server thinks is your hostname.
  • All info from /whois replies are displayed in the right colour and with «Whois» at the start now
  • Wallop messages, usually from server admins talking to each other, are now displayed correctly
  • No more crashes if you have more than 40 ignore entries in your list
  • Made editing of long alias entries work a bit better. I've given the aliases listview a horizontal scrollbar, removed the word wrapping, and fixed a saving bug. Previously, if the alias was word wrapped over 3 lines it would saving the same alias three times.
  • Buttons for channel tabs are now fully visible with Zune systems (Both OS3 and AROS)
  • When closing tabs under Zune systems, the window no longer resizes itself to a smaller size. I now make WookieChat close its window, close the tab, then reopen the window afterwards. It's an ugly workaround, but I couldnt figure out any other way to get around the window resizing. At least, not so far.
  • Tried to fix a crash when cancelling outgoing file transfers that hadn't yet begun.
  • OS4 version is now compiled for newlib, making the executable 80k smaller. Also, I noticed that in a few functions that I was using the same code in a few places, so I've turned it into a function, and saved an extra few kbytes here and there.
  • Buffer Saving seems to work properly now. Redid a few lines of code that I typed while still learning C years ago.
  • If "progdir:colours/" doesnt exist, the directory is now created silently
  • DCC File Transfer messages should appear in the right tabs now
  • Added an alternative clipboard hook. More details on this are in the power_users.txt document.
What does this software do?

WookieChat allows you to connect to Internet Relay Chat networks (IRC) and chat with other users in a text medium in real-time. Some of the server groups are preconfigured to join an Amiga chat channel upon sucessful connection. Executables are provided for AmigaOS 3.x and 4.0

And as always... WookieChat is uncrippled SHAREWARE. If you like this piece of software, please register! Registration is NOT mandatory! No feature is disabled!



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