Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of the oldest technologies for online chatrooms, used in particular by the open-source communities (I’m looking at you, #phpbb, #phpbb-mod, and #wordpress). However, the selection of clients for Mac OS X has been rather miniscule and pathetic, with the best being the venerable Colloquy. However, Colloquy has had its share of problems, including a number of bugs in the code, incompatibility with Safari 3, and a number of design quirks that I’ve not been happy with (honestly, I really LIKE seeing the whole channel topic, and don’t tell me otherwise!). Thankfully, I’ve recently discovered a new competitor for the Mac OS X IRC “market”, Linkinus. (Do all OS X IRC apps have to have weird names?) 
Linkinus doesn’t contain that many “revolutionary” features, but it’s a very solid IRC client that takes advantage of the Mac OS X look and feel very nicely. It has a fairly iTunes 7-style interface, which very nicely lists the networks and channels on the left, but lists the users on the right, instead of in the same list (much smarter than Colloquy). You can choose different styles for the message window, so you can have your messages displayed in totally blinding style or a calmer plain style. One of the more ingenious features concerns my beef with the channel topic (see above). Instead of listing the full channel topic on the top or restricting it to just one line (like Colloquy does), it displays the channel topic in one line, but when you hover your mouse over the topic, it neatly scrolls the topic across, marquee style. That’s one of those eye-grabbing features which is really slick. Linkinus also includes support for the more advanced IRC features, including aliases/shortcuts (for example, I have /dfph to do “/me passes around the deep-fried pickle hearts” and /slap %1 to do “/me slaps %1 around a bit with a large trout”).
Overall, Linkinus is a very stable IRC client that works very well and has a very well-designed and well-thought out interface, which beats all the other OS X IRC clients out there. Colloquy is okay if you don’t want to pay anything, but if you’re a real IRC junkie, Linkinus is definitely worth the $20.
Final Rating: 
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