Dear mIRC User,

mIRC version 6.14 has been released today.

With this new release we think to address the most important comments, requests and remarks we received after the release of version 6.12. The new version fixes lots of the small but nevertheless annoying buggies found in the previous version. Among them the much discussed tooltip gpf bug and a daylight savings time offset bug.

How to upgrade?
As you know mIRC is distributed in a self-extracting cabinet (mirc614.exe) that helps you to install mIRC on your PC. Simply download the cabinet and run the installer. Follow the instructions the installer program gives to you. When upgrading all your old settings and scripts will stay as they were, if you want that. Read the questions the installer program asks with care and nothing can go wrong. You will be chatting with the new mIRC in no time. If you get stuck or if you want to find out more about a certain feature, just click on a Help button or browse the Help file and you should find lots of hints to help you out. We also give some information on changed, improved and fixed features and functions below.

Where to download?
For the latest download addresses look on the download page on the mIRC websites. On the mIRC websites also the new mIRC FAQ version 56 (mfaq56hp.zip) is available. The FAQ answers a lot of questions regarding mIRC, IRC, DCC and the like. It also includes a tutorial on Aliases, Popups and on 'programming' the Tools/Remote section.

Registering mIRC
As you know, mIRC can be downloaded freely and evaluated for 30 days. If you find that you enjoy using mIRC, it would be great and much appreciated if you registered your copy. This licenses you to keep your copy of mIRC and helps to support our continued work on mIRC. You can find out how to register here.

Fixes, improvements and new features.
While we tried to focus on fixing things, of course some new features and functions have been added. Although some of these new things, like the SSL support, might have to mature a bit over the next versions, we think it is fun to play with them already! A few items I'd like to mention as useful changes:

- Lots of work has been done on the support of multi-byte character encodings and the sjis-jis support. Khaled has added a "Multibyte editbox" option to the Messages dialog, which makes mIRC use a richedit editbox in all mIRC Windows for entering text. mIRC was using the standard Windows editbox before. The richedit editbox displays complex scripts properly. The Sjis/Jis and Multibyte options are now automatically enabled if mIRC detects a Multibyte version of Windows the first time mIRC is run. Khaled also fixed various multi-byte display/mark/copy bugs.

- An option to 'reload' logs has been added to the /IRC/Logging/ dialog. It will make mIRC load the tail of a logfile into your channel and chat windows. Seems to work fine. However, various line attributes, such as color, are not (yet) saved in the log files, so the reloaded log is displayed in the normal text color.

- Support for SSL has been added. You'll have to download some DLL's of OpenSSL 0.9.7c separately from mIRC and place them in the mIRC folder for this to work. mIRC will load the dll's automatically if it finds them, after which you can initiate a secure connection to an SSL capable IRC server. SSL settings can be found in the Connect/Options dialog, and are visible only when openssl dlls are loaded.

- A Sort dialog has been added to the Window Menu. It allows you to specify the sort order of Switchbar buttons and Window types. Buttons are always sorted into groups. With the /View/Options/Display/ sort option turned off, Switchbar buttons are sorted according to creation time within groups as opposed to alphabetical sorting.

- By popular request Query/Chat windows now remember their individual font settings. We also
- moved the port range options, which now applies to all connections, to a /Connect/Advanced/ dialog,
- added a /cnick -sN switch, sorts item into Nth position,
- made the switchbar to allow up to eight lines in height and displays scroll buttons when it is vertical,
- fixed a $com() dispatch pointers bug,
- added an :error goto point, by which script errors can be caught, and
- improved the find dialog in the script editor a lot.

As you see there are heaps of changes and improvements. Lots of little and larger changes to smoothen your IRC experience. You'll have to dig through the help file in mIRC and the whatsnew.txt on the website to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. Some are obvious, some need getting used to - please take your time to play with them and see how it works. If you have questions, ask away on this Message Board!

Thanks for using mIRC, have fun on IRC,