Mibbit blog

Just a heads up, there seem to be a few oddities with the main client.

The plan was to do a new release on Saturday. However, this didn’t work too well and so the version on the backend was rolled back. The frontend is still the new version.

Please email contact@mibbit.com if you do have any issues you think are related to this. The new release has been delayed a little, but should be out in the next day or two.

• The “18 Users” shown above the UserList is now optional, disable it in Prefs->User List->Show # users above
• The max length for IRC channel input is set to 361 at the moment. I might change this later, but for now it prevents surprises when your text is cut off for other users.
• The mute icon is gone for now. Sound will be revamped shortly.
• The [account] [channels] and [profile] tabs have been updated, cleaner and better.
• Confirm to disconnect from a server is now shown at the top, and doesn’t interfere with the comms. Same if there is a nick collision.
• New prefs for general tabs – [Welcome] [Account] etc. Prefs->General->Tabs->”Default” and “Default background”. If you don’t like green, go pink! go mad!
• Photobucket API integration. If you receive a link to a photobucket hosted image, you will now see a (i) with interesting metadata if you hover over it. The thumbnail will also come directly from photobucket.

Things are progressing nicely with the new widget, which will have all the updates the main client got last week, and some more ‘premium’ functionality.

It’s looking likely we’ll be ready to start Beta testing a premium widget in the next week or 2.

It’s been a while since the last large update, but it’s finally happened Here’s a list of some of the updates included…

• You can now change the size of the tabs at the top. Make them as big or small as you prefer.
• You can change the size of the input bar to suit your tastes.
• When you change prefs, most things will update instantly. There’s only a few things that will need a [reload]
• Server tabs now show the network name when known, leaving you a bit of extra space. For example, “Mibbit” instead of “irc.mibbit.net”. If you really want to know, hover over it, and you can see the full address.
• Lots of work on internationalization. We should be ready to add new language support very easily now.
• Whois replies now get 379,310,313 (modes, help, operator)
• When a topic changes, the infobar now updates as it should, to show the new topic.
• Frontpage is now tidier, it won’t show up until you can use it, and the Yahoo and Twitter logins have been combined
• The old footer is gone. It was taking up space, and not really that useful. If you want to know which version of the client you’re running, hover over the frog logo
• PART with a reason now works as it should do. Also if you /part a channel, it’ll show properly in the tab, as it would if you were kicked. (Usage: “/part <channels> [reason]” eg “/part #foo,#bar I’m gone!”)
• /away notifications are back, working as they were
• Tab complete on nicks is improved. Previously, if it couldn’t complete any more, it just stopped. Now it works better. For example, suppose we have a channel with “Jodie” and “Joseph” in it. Here’s how it’d work: [J] [TAB] -> “Jo” -> [TAB] -> “Jodie” -> [TAB] -> “Joseph” -> [TAB] -> “Jodie”. So you can quickly cycle through the options until you find the one you’re after.
• Several things are now done on a network basis rather than server. For example, if you connect to irc.mibbit.com and I connect to irc.mibbit.net extended /whois info, typing notify etc all work now as they should. Even though we’re on different names.

The widget now has a valid ssl certificate, so you can use https://widget.mibbit.com on your site if you wish.

There’s still one or two things that are coming from non HTTPS servers, such as the tab backgrounds, and image thumbnailing. These will be updated to use https at a later date.

Work is progressing nicely with a new version of the main client, but it’s not *quite* ready for release. It has some fairly big changes in it, so I want to be sure it’s not going to break anything