After a long, long, long time, I finally did it. I was asked sometime ago by an old friend of mine to play around with creating a style for his little IRC client for Mac OS X. My tinkering finally produced a style that I was happy with enough to want to release it to the public.

For those not familiar with it, Colloquy is a slick IRC client for Mac OS X. It’s an open-source project developed primarily by an old co-worker and long time friend of mine - although I believe he’s had some good contributors now. If you’ve not played with it before and you use IRC at all, I really recommend you check it out. In my opinion, it’s the best Apple-like IRC experience you can find.

Anyways, the style I developed is rather minimalist and completely monochromatic. I wanted to create a style that was both out of the way but really meshes with the Apple experience. I found creating a style for IRC to be a really fascinating task because of the critical thinking required for displaying the information. There’s quite a lot to consider when you get into it. It’s not just showing who said what and when, though that is the majority of it. You also have to consider the overall stream of information and how to tone down the information overload. You’ve got server messages to deal with, URL link styles, action messages… and maintaining the timeline is key. All in all, it was a fun challenge.

‘Aluminum’ being my first style for Colloquy I’m sure there are things I could have approached better. I’ll likely still tweak it a bit even though it’s been released (because after all, I am a perfectionist). For now though, you can grab Alluminum for Colloquy at the Colloquy website. Enjoy!

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