I still use IRC to this day, just the client and the OS are different.
Winamp hasn't aged so well, sadly.
Everything wants to make a "universal media library manager". Jesus, doesn't anybody just want to name their MP3 correctly and then use file management, and then have an audio player that just plays audio?
IIRC, the last time I used Audacious, the default interface was a loosely-inspired-by-itunes kinda UI, but tweaking the right knobs in the configuration screens could get it to a Winamp-like UI (or at least XMMS-like)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_(software) confirms a lot of my recollection.
As an early fan of Winamp, what I have found is that most people do not want the Winamp experience these day. The problem with Winamp is it came with no music, only a JJ McKay promo.
There are many players that seek to emulate the Winamp experience but much of the audience for something like that have moved on to Spotify. Today's audiences want a fully curated experience from their "Player", which Winamp was never designed to do.
ಠ_ಠ
I obviously write a lot of code in Go but as a language it's also a really nice pairing with the IRC protocol. The way you write abstractions and tests just lends itself so well to writing desktop applications. On the other hand, writing UIs in Go (which I've tried in a multitude of ways) is just a really poor fit because asking Go to emulate Elm architecture is very clunky.
From my perspective, UIs are side effect driven code and demand a language that can fit that paradigm not just well, but great. Anything else I would or could have chosen would've required way more CGO dependencies than I have (of which I only have 1 atm) and would have read worse when I tried to hook it into Go.
Conversely, Wails' bridge to Typescript and React is very simple to use, reliable, and keeps up with the performance and consistency demands on an IRC client. Tailwind is also just very good at making compatible CSS; I was inspired by the use of QT in modern car infotainment systems in my selection of a component-based CSS approach.
Lastly, the whole thing is compiled into the binary that you download and makes no external calls on its own. It's all built on top of the OS WebView rather than a third-party browser the way, say, Electron is.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I don't think about resource utilization in a vacuum: native apps require I develop three different apps and likely have a lot of CGO dependencies. With Wails and the OS WebView the same client you're used to using on MacOS should work the same or similarly on Linux and Windows within reason. They should also all maintain similar resource utilization profiles. That's why I said it's limited in its footprint, I'm not here to compete with native library performance and native library performance isn't trying to compete with my ability to cross-compile.
Process PID Avg CPU Footprint (MiB)
------------------------------ ------ --------- ---------------
Cascade 45314 0.46% 73.0
WebKit WebContent 45349 0.50% 392.9
WebKit GPU 45347 <0.01% 26.1
WebKit Networking 45348 0.02% 6.5
Nick completer plugin 45344 <0.01% 2.8
Nickname colors plugin 45345 <0.01% 9.7
ThemeWidget service 41353 <0.01% 10.1
SafariPlatformSupport helper 41355 <0.01% 13.1
------------------------------ ------ --------- ---------------
Total 1.00% 534.2
App Main PID Uptime Avg CPU Main MiB Total MiB
------------ -------- ------------ ------- -------- ---------
Cascade 45314 6d 17h 45m 1.52% 73.0 556.8
Proton Drive 22091 11d 04h 32m 0.15% 48.0 65.1
Ghostty 78285 27d 22h 03m <0.01% 173.6 184.2
Finder 1308 34d 19h 32m 0.05% 104.4 104.4
I’ve been checking your client for a while and it looks awesome, thanks for the reminder, finally after 30+ years I think I really got tired and left IRC for good but I’ll download and give it a go later today.
Then MSN Messenger displaced it (at least in Spain) and it didn't have even 10% of ICQ's functionality.
I long to bring this back in a Miranda-IM way (super customizable), but other projects get in the way.
I don't care if only a handful of us (few milly) find it useful.
In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.
Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.
>ICQ was not some elite hacker thing
Sure, exactly IRC was that hacker thing.
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.
ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.
AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.
Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.
Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?
Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
It's just yahoo groups that requires your phone number.
I cannot believe this stupid app is so popular when you can't even monitor multiple servers at once! When every brother and their mother has a discord server but I can only look at one channel on one server at a time??
However I like that I can see all the channel with unread messages at once, and can switch between them quickly. On Discord if I'm chatting in three channels spread across two servers then switching takes two clicks.
Nitro, Shop, and Quests. What are these even?
Even their changelog page is wtf (https://discord.com/tags/changelog)
Shop is where they sell customization stuff.
Quests let you earn currency you can use to buy customization stuff or nitro instead of real money.
I don't think there's a significantly better way to do whatever they are doing, and I don't see anything particularly objectionable about any of it.
Shop is where you can buy additional customizations.
Quests get you exclusive unlocks for various games.
Maybe I may officially old now, but I recall I could converse on IRC, not full screen, on a 800x600 15" monitor. Yes I know today we have tons of pictures and emojis and so we obviously need a bit more room. But common. Even slack takes slightly less room that discord for the same amount of information.
And yes, I enabled compact mode.
We're you on IRC? Much more information dense.
They're there of course because some 'normie' thing of theres inevitably requires the sign-up of a discord for bonus game skins or some other such stupid shit, but the fact remains that they're clueless.
much like the average Outlook user, they're there because they were dragged into it by another element in their life (their job) and they really have no background or clue on how to use the piece of software, they just know they need to pretend and cite experience on the CV for a job.