Colloquy is a non-traditional IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) chat client. Traditionally, IRC clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy has an unintrusive chat window that lets the user focus on chatting and brings the beauty of Aqua to IRC.

Timothy Hatcher: Colloquy started about 3 years ago when I was working with an Internet music station called Massinova. I was responsible for all the Mac goodies, the dockling and menu extra. I started work on a Massinova specific desktop application that let users request music, browse the library and chat on our #massinova IRC room. Massinova slowly died due to stricter Internet radio licensing laws. A friend from Massinova contacted me a while after and talked me into stripping out the IRC part and making it an new client. That was the birth of Colloquy. My main motivation at that time was to make an alternative client to Ircle and Snak, to make a more "Mac" like client. My motivations now is to innovate in any area that has been pretty stagnate for the last 6-8 years.

OSDir: What do you think are its best features?

Timothy Hatcher: Colloquy has a few innovative features. The first one came with version 2.0 and that is the Styles based on XHTML/CSS and XML/XSL. The next being our Smart Transcripts that allow users to control filters and group chat messages based on extensive rules. Colloquy's AppleScriptability and plugin support has always been above and beyond any other client also.

OSDir: What is cooking for future releases?

Timothy Hatcher: We are exploring more scripting languages, like Ruby (using the ObjC-Ruby bridge). Better DCC file transfers and finally DCC chat support. More user interface improvements, global preferences and per-room preferences.

OSDir: What do you consider its biggest challenger? Aqua X-Chat?

Timothy Hatcher: X-Chat Aqua and the oldies (Snak and Ircle). The latter seem to really be hurting now in the world of OS X. We have had countless users come into the Colloquy chat room saying they just switched from Ircle or Snak. There are still many users of command-line clients like Irssi, but they don't have the same target audience we do.

Colloquy on OSDir.com