Emoticons and other images in-line with text has been requested many times as argv0 pointed out. In fact, there is a sticky in this forum regarding it. I am sure it will eventually be added, but is not a priority because there is little real benefit to a chat program other than "eye candy" (making things look "fancy"). I've added my own suggestions on how to implement it in a way that will benefit not only people who want emoticons, but also those who want to do some more interesting themes or other things with mIRC. I'm sure it will be done at some point, but it probably won't be very soon.
Graphical windows? I'm not sure the point of that. mIRC is a text chat program, so there isn't much need for a graphical window for the chatting windows in mIRC. If you need or want a graphical (aka picture) window, that's already available. And you can even use that throughout mIRC, completely replacing the existing channel and query windows if you want. Of course, that requires a LOT of work, but it is entirely possible and some people have done that, I believe.
Switching to UTF doesn't have to be difficult. People just want to make it difficult. If an ircd doesn't support UTF8, then first off, it's probably not a good ircd. And second, the network should seriously consider either replacing it with one that does support UTF-8, or else put some pressure on the ircd developers to add UTF-8 support. If all Russian servers said they were going to stop using a specific ircd because of lack of UTF-8 support, the ircd would have little choice but to update very quickly or they may never recover. The fact is that UTF-8 has been around for a very long time. Code pages have been outdated for a very long time. Major IRC clients all support UTF-8. The only thing holding Russians and others who use code pages back are the networks and any users who refuse to update their client. If someone refuses to update their client, there really isn't much we can do to help them. And if a network won't update to be current, then the network will most likely die away eventually because of it.
If you want a very simple solution, move any channels that you are associated with to a network that supports UTF-8. Moving to a new network is a pain, but I've done it and it really isn't that difficult. As channels start leaving those networks for new ones, the networks will have to update or they won't have many users left.
In the end, it comes down to the user choosing to change. Khaled has said that mIRC will no longer support code pages and he's sticking to that and that's a good thing. Supporting really old and outdated things doesn't make a program better.
And if you look around, someone has probably scripted a code page to UTF-8 conversion script that you could use if you found it. Maybe not, but it's worth checking into if you need it.
