Wallops - A modern IRC client for classic Mac OS

Wallops is a modern IRC client that I wrote on and for my Macintosh Plus. It is written for System 6 and has been tested on up to Mac OS 9.

It requires MacTCP and supports multiple connections, channels, and query windows in a tabbed interface. When run under MultiFinder, it can run in the background using Notification Manager to flash the Apple menu icon when one's nick is mentioned while the window is hidden.

Wallops is free software and its source code is available under an ISC license. I also have some videos about its development and C programming on System 6 in general.

Latest Update: Wallops 2.1 Released (2024-09-23)

Another update to Wallops building on the 2.0 release is available:

• wallops-2.1.sit (StuffIt 3 archive)
  SHA256: 7cb16046e076488e1997e1232631cf2dc9737bac0a94f0348caf5d183927f4a9
  SHA1: fd1d7145aa4baaf5322175f348644d1057267a65

This update includes a number of new features and bugfixes:

• Implement tab completion in channels; by typing part of a user's nick and pressing tab, the input bar will show their completed nick with ":" after it
• Do UTF-8 to MacRoman conversion of incoming text, where possible
• Add support for /connect, /reconnect, and /server to reconnect after a broken connection, or to switch servers, without having to close the window
• Add keyboard shortcuts Cmd-1 through Cmd-9 to switch to that numbered tab, and Cmd-, and Cmd-. to switch to the previous and next tabs
• Add support for /say, useful when having to say something starting with a slash
• Limit input line to the maximum IRC line length and beep when it's exceeded
• Handle when a user being queried changes their nick
• Handle DNR (MacTCP's DNS resolver) returning 0.0.0.0 when a host does not exist
• When sending a message to a user with /msg, don't update the server window's tab since the activity is only what we just sent
• Improve matching the user's own nick when highlighting messages to us (and notifying about them), including matches not just at the beginning of a line
• Fix notifications sometimes not being canceled
• Fix handling the user's nick when changed and not in any channels
• Fix background window updates that were sometimes drawing over the wrong window
• Fix rendering of outline on connection window's Connect button