DMDircthe intelligent IRC client

With DMDirc 0.6 coming soon (hopefully — we still have a few bits and pieces to finish off), we’re starting to look ahead towards the next major branch: DMDirc 0.7. The 0.7 branch has several major new features, namely sever lists and a revamped update system, both of which have extensive core and UI components. There are also a large number of smaller features and enhancements: we have over 80 issues open for the 0.7 branch, and this number is growing fairly steadily.

Looking back on the 0.6 branch, one of the things we’d like to change most is the length of time between each release. Ignoring security and bug fixes, there was a four month gap between 0.5 and 0.5.5, and it looks like DMDirc 0.6 will be released between six and seven months after that. This isn’t because we’re getting lazy, or because we care less about DMDirc than we did when we released the first few versions (which were all inside of the same month); it’s because we’re implementing more features, fixing more bugs, and doing more behind-the-scenes work (improving the DMDirc code base) than we have in previous releases. To combat this somewhat, we’re aiming to make three releases as part of the 0.7 development series - DMDirc 0.6.3, 0.6.6 and 0.7. We’ve allocated issues to each release to try and balance the time it will take (DMDirc 0.5.5 wasn’t a pre-planned release and, as you can tell from the timing, didn’t split the workload too well), so hopefully we’ll be able to make releases somewhat more frequently than we have been.

Pre-planning these sub-releases has also enabled us to organise issues better so that we’re working on (and releasing) related features at the same time. The rough focus of each release is described below. Note that these are just the major, overarching themes; each release also contains a good helping of smaller, independent enhancements.

• DMDirc 0.6.3: Server lists, input/command improvements, plugin improvements
• DMDirc 0.6.6: Updater overall, installer and launcher improvements
• DMDirc 0.7: Channel and general window/UI improvements

Of course, if you can’t wait for releases to try out all the new features, you can download a nightly build, which can auto-update with the latest features and bug fixes each day.

With the upcoming version 0.6 of DMDirc (we know that it’s been a while since the last big release, we’ll blog about that soon) we have added support for even more operating systems.

As you probably know, DMDirc is written in Java which gives us a huge advantage as far as cross-platform compatibility is concerned. Java runs on all the major operating systems so most of the hard work has been done for us.

Up to DMDirc 0.5.6 we only supported Windows and Linux and provided a separate jar-only download for other platforms. For 0.6 the supported list of operating systems has more than doubled; we now package DMDirc for:

1. Linux
2. Windows
3. OS X
4. Open Solaris (and normal Solaris)
5. BSD (tested on PC-BSD, which is FreeBSD at the core)

This pretty much covers all major non-server operating systems, which we are quite pleased about.

The Installer for DMDirc runs on all of the above systems (apart from OS X, which has its own installation method) and where possible can download and install Java automatically. Currently the only exception to this is BSD, where users will need to compile the jdk16 port manually — unfortunately Sun’s licensing prevents redistribution of the modified JRE used on BSD.

The nightly builds have been working on all of the above operating systems for a while now, and you can browse and download the installers from our nightly builds page.