I think some comments in this thread an indirectly pointed out a problem. Our impressions of IRC are shaped a lot by the way we interact with it, which has been 99% through a mirc style interface - plain text, an editbox, and a nicklist.
IM clients changed this, but it wasn't IRC anymore. We have alot of the features already built into mirc - the problem is they need to be more eyecandyish.
I suggest that some of you meander over to the developer forum and look at AKO's new IRCd thread - in which its suggested some feasible ways to add functionality to the protocol.
Search back also, and look at some of my thoughts on the mirc address book.
If mirc shot off at a tangent and did a _novel and quirky_ approach to interacting with IRC I think we wouldn't see stuff like this.
Microsoft chat of course tried, and failed, with the comic chat idea. UGH! I am not suggesting we go that way.
Specifically; I think we need a style of browser like 'taskbar', where you can drag and drop nicknames into address books/notify lists.
I think we need to be able to hide and dock windows alot more fluidly.
It wouldn't be harder to implement than redoing the nicklist control, the taskbar control and using 99% of the code for a /uwho.
The current script dialog system, i kinda wouldn't mind seeing it thrown out and redone completely - having most dialogs in mirc parsed with a GUI style engine like PHP-GTK is, or winamp's wasabi - this would let scripts customise interfaces, or simply inherit all of the underlying code, methods and events. Combine this with resource strings and you begin to break away from the out-of-the-box feel mirc always has retained (MTS can't redo internal dialogs, so i'm quietly ignoring it)
This way we could _DO_ buddylists, without having to know much more than some rather advanced scripting. Of course, i'nm reasonable, and I don't think any of these things are likely to happen, due to the lack of time and effort.
The best script(SmartICQ) I ever saw doing this had to use, of all things, picture windows - a lot of power, but slow when you can't draw transparently.
Hell, we all know the track record on GUI changes, and I don't want to have to make a large fuss and wander away from these boards as codemastr unfortunately did.
