DMDircthe intelligent IRC client

We have just released version 0.5 of DMDirc.

0.5 has just under 100 features or improvements and 77 bug fixes since 0.4, the major additions in 0.5 are

* Added action wrappers for aliases and performs
* Added intelligent tab completion for commands
* Added server settings dialog
* Added support for themes
* Added support for character transcoding
* Added support for various command-line options
* Added installers for Windows and Linux

See the changelog for more information on this release. As always we recommend existing users to upgrade, and non-users to give it a go, come visit us in #DMDirc on Quakenet (see the help menu) with your feedback or just to visit.

0.5 can be downloaded for windows and linux

Further to the changes to the actions UI previously mentioned, there are now several more enhancements: one exposing substitutions and two UIs wrapping around actions simplifying common tasks — aliases and performs.

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DMDirc has now entered Feature Freeze for the 0.5 release (for more information about our release cycle, see this blog post).

New for this release we have decided to build Release Candidate builds approximately every day.
Release Candidate builds are just like the final release: they are installed using the new installer, and they are feature complete for 0.5. Their purpose is help discover/iron out any last bugs before we tag and release 0.5 into the wild and begin on 0.6.

RC1 was released yesterday (Downloads: Linux and Windows) with RC2 hopefully being ready tonight.

Once we get an RC build with no apparent bugs, we will release 0.5 :)

As part of our aim to make DMDirc into a good, cross-platform IRC Client, it was decided early on that it required an actual installer to make packaging/distributing/installing the client much easier.

Originally this was scheduled for 0.7, but just prior to the release of DMDirc 0.4 we rescheduled it to 0.5 and it was assigned to me (as I had the least other tasks to do - the main bulk of the parser is complete).

So since we released 0.4, I have been working almost entirely on this, and can happily say the first revision of the installer is completed.

One of the key requirements for the installer is that it should run on all the (desktop) platforms that DMDirc runs on, which right now are Windows (2000, XP, 2003, Vista) and Linux.

Below are a few screen shots showing the installer running on XP (using both Classic and Normal themes), and Windows Vista:

Linux screenshots coming soon.

Mac users may note that there is no Mac Version of the installer. This is due to the lack of availability of a Mac to test on, and the lack of a proper release of Java 6 for OS X. I am hoping to have the installer running on the Mac for the first release after Java 6 becomes available properly (although the lack of a Mac for testing could make this awkward - donations welcome!)

At the moment the installer requires Java 6 to be installed on the machine already. If the installer is ran on a machine without Java, or with a version that is too old, it will notify (via console in Linux, or a dialog box on Windows) the user that they need to install or update Java first. One of our goals for DMDirc 0.6 is to produce a version of the installer that bundles Java 6, or can download it for the user.

To allow for pre-release testing of the installer, you will find here two copies of the installer (one for Linux, one for Windows), and their MD5 hashes. These are pre-release, possibly unstable and/or broken versions of DMDirc, compiled against SVN revision 2030, and as such the installers or the client they install may not function, suddenly burst into flames, or sacrifice your first born child. These should, therefore, be used at your own risk. However, if the installers (or the client) actually do something they shouldn’t, or don’t do something they should please feel free to submit an issue report or reply to this post.

Now the files:

• Windows Pre-Release Installer (SVN Revision: 2030)
• Windows Pre-Release Installer MD5 checksum (SVN Revision: 2030)
• Linux Pre-Release Installer (SVN Revision: 2030)
• Linux Pre-Release Installer MD5 checksum (SVN Revision: 2030)

Clicking on “more” will go into more depth on how the installer(s) work.
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One of the best things about DMDirc is, in my opinion, its robust actions system. Actions allow you to do virtually anything you can do in a far more complex scripting language, with the benefit of being fairly easy to hide behind a nice user interface.

Unfortunately, with something as flexible as actions, it’s hard to get the UI right the first time around. For DMDirc 0.5 we’re introducing a few minor changes which will hopefully make creating and editing actions easier.

The first of our two tweaks is a change in the behaviour of the actions manager. In DMDirc 0.4, to edit an action you need to click the group tab (if it’s not selected), move your mouse down to the action, click on it, and then mouse all the way over to the edit button (taking care not to hit any of the six other buttons that line the bottom of the manager). In DMDirc 0.5, you can simply double click on an action to open it in the editor.

The second tweak is a change to the “Trigger” drop down menu in the actions editor. In DMDirc 0.4, this is a long list that only has a vague sense of order (in fact, the order of items in the list is the order we defined them in code, which is generally based more on when they were added, rather than what they’re for). In DMDirc 0.5, the triggers list is split into distinct groups, and the triggers within a group are sorted alphabetically, making it much easier to find what you’re looking for. Before and after pictures are below, although they don’t do the changes much justice, thanks to the rather limited size of the dropdown menu.

We have several more improvements planned for the actions UI before 0.5 is released, and we also have some brand new UI to make using certain types of actions even easier, which we’ll be blogging about later.