I use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) a lot. When I first transitioned to the Mac, I found that the IRC client arena was basically composed of two cack old carbonised applications (Snak and something else; I tried both, and they were both awful), and a relatively immature X-Chat Aqua.

Non-IRCers may not be aware that in the field of GUI IRC clients, X-Chat is The Daddy. mIRC may be more widely used, but it's not Free or free and frankly, it's arse. It's widely used because it was, for a long time, the only proper 32-bit client on Windows and as such it's always at the top of the results for "IRC client" at places like [link|http://www.download.com|http://www.download.com].

X-Chat is king of the (GUI - IRC purists tend to go for either IRCII or irssi, both of which are, in the tradition of "super" console applications like mutt, about 30% as good as their adoring worshippers would have you believe) heap; its GTK+ interface has ensured that it's portable and relatively unfugly. (The discussion of the non-free binary version for Win32 is not for this post). It has scripting interfaces for Perl, Python and TCL. And probably anything else you care to name. It's got one-click kickbanning. It's got a lovely XDCC tool. It is, in short, The Complete IRC Client.

Of course, "relatively unfugly" to an OS X user means "scrape my eyes out with a spoon lest I continue to see this abomination", and so X-Chat Aqua was born. It's basically a port of the X-Chat IRC engine and interface to Aqua. It's good; the Perl and TCL plugins work, it's a lot better than Snak, but.

But.

It's still an Aqua-fied GTK+ application. The preferences dialogue is most un-OSXy. It stores things in .xchat2, and so on and so forth.

It also has the rather unfortunate habit of periodically going insane and stealing all the CPU time, which causes a chap to level unfounded accusations of cackitude at innocent applications.

This is where Conversation comes in.

Built for OS X from the ground up, it sports the annoying Metal interface (which, in all honesty, I've become quite comfortable with after an initial period of "you tossers, Apple") and is properly Maclike in all respects.

Installation is a snap; no "SETUP.EXE, *double-click* <next> I agree <next> I don't care <next> <next> <next> *pointless reboot* Why did you put icons in six different places you useless bastard", no "apt-get install this that the-other (worralorradependencies)", no "tar xvzf conversation.tgz && cd conversation && configure && make install (oops gotta build me some libraries first)". Just download the disk image (it'll automount), and drag Conversation to wherever you want to keep it. You can move it around, too. Eject & delete disk image.

As an IRC client, it's dandy; multiple server support is fine, multiple channels is handled well. Channel modes are indicated by clear icons. You can timestamp flexibly, or not at all. If you're feeling like a omfgbbq teen queen, you can turn smileys on. It uses little memory, and next to no CPU (and well it should). If you use [link|http://growl.info/|Growl], then you'll see Growl notifications for various events, if you want them; I like this.

In short, I recommend [link|http://homepage.mac.com/philrobin/conversation/|Conversation] if you want to use IRC on OS X.

(Tell you want I don't recommend, though, and it's a shame. AdiumX. In other respects, quite the perfect multinetwork IM client, it has (due to its libgaim foundations) a really depressingly bad IRC client. GAIM users can try this for themselves)