Q. What in your words is the best way to describe DMDirc?
Chris: I think “the intelligent IRC client” sums it up nicely, which happens to be our slogan.
Q. Where does the name DMDirc come from?
Shane: A few years ago myself, Chris and Simon (a friend off IRC) decided to start an IRC client in Delphi, the name came from the first letters of our nicknames (plus 'irc', of course) — Dataforce, MD87, Demented-Idiot. This client didn't get very far, but when myself and Chris once again wanted to make an IRC client we used the same name.
Q. How many people make up the development side of DMDirc?
Shane: There are 3 developers (myself, Chris and Greg), and a number of testers.
Q. Of your development team members, how many of you still use IRC on a regular basis?
Shane: All of us actively use IRC 24/7 and have done for a number of years now
Chris: I think it's more like a decade or so than 'a number of years' ;)
Greg: I don't think I could stop using it if I tried, it's a part of my life.
Q. Do you still actually enjoy using IRC or is it simply to keep up with things to progress development?
Shane: I still enjoy using IRC, I find its a good way to communicate with groups of people and share ideas/information.
Chris: I think we all still enjoy using IRC; it's the only explanation for the amount of time we spend using it!
Greg: It's still fun, if i wasn't enjoying using IRC i think my development efforts would dry up.
Q. Why would or should a user make use of DMDirc over another client?
Shane: It's in active development, works across a number of platforms and free. The developers are also very passionate about IRC and always willing to help.
Greg: In my opinion using IRC is easier with DMDirc.
Q. What are the unique features of DMDirc?
Shane: Tab completion of commands and intelligent linking of URLs (Example: if a URL is linked on IRC with brackets around it, we don't include the brackets in the link). The latter is probably the most useful, although it's hard to live without the former.
Greg: Actions, they're nearly as powerful as a scripting language but much more accessible.
Q. How much research do you do on other clients when developing DMDirc?
Shane: We do a lot of research into other clients. I use Linux on my desktop, have XP and Vista running in VirtualBox, and have an Intel Mac Mini running Leopard to allow me to look at other clients as well as test DMDirc on various different platforms.
Chris: We pretty much test every client we hear about. It helps to see how we're doing in comparison to them, and sometimes features (or bugs) in other clients will give us ideas on how to improve DMDirc.
Q. Why Java?
Shane: When we first started DMDirc we had all just switched to using Linux and myself and Chris had both started learning Java in university so it seemed a good way to improve our Java skills and create an IRC Client that we liked. The cross platform aspect of Java was a nice extra.
Greg: I don't think an application is worth writing if it isn't cross platform these days, Java is mostly a nice language to develop in.
Q. Many people feel Java is slow when used for full blown applications, what's your opinion on this?
Shane: Most people who think that haven't used Java recently or have used poorly coded applications. In recent versions of Java sun have sped it up quite considerably with plans to improve it even further.
Greg: Java has improved greatly in the past few versions, it was very bad a few years ago.
Q. What's the biggest goal you have for DMDirc?
Shane: Take over the world and make lots of money some how.
Chris: Having a useful client with a reasonable number of users.
Greg: To create an IRC renaissance, or just create a good IRC experience for the users, either works for me.
Q. What's been your biggest accomplishment when developing DMDirc to date?
Shane: I quite like the actions system, but I think the biggest thing that I've done personally was the installer code for the three different platforms we support. We only have Linux servers so it all has to compile on Linux whilst still using native code.
Q. Are there any easter eggs or hidden features within DMDirc?
Shane: There might be ;)
Chris: It's not really an easter egg, but the /debug command has quite a few useful subcommands (try tab completing them)
Q. Is there any new features about upcoming release you can inform our users about?
Chris: DMDirc 0.6 is coming out very shortly, and we have a changelog available for that. Beyond that, we have a summary of major planned features, and everyone is free to browse the issue tracker.
Q. Where would you like to see DMDirc in 1, 5 and 10 years time from now?
Chris: In a year I think we'll still be working hard on getting towards 1.0. After that, hopefully we'll have a great client to use and we'll just be making the occasional plugin for it when we have an itch to scratch. Or maybe we'll have come up with a whole bunch of amazing new features we want, and we'll be toiling towards 2.0 ;)
Q. Do you ever see a license change coming to DMDirc such as possibly offering a pro version or charging for windows builds?
Shane: No, we are strongly opposed to the idea of charging for DMDirc in any way. Everything we do for DMDirc we try to make open source and available on our SVN. There's no real effort for us to compile things for windows as everything is automated by a collection of bash scripts.
Chris: We're all open-source advocates, and I'm personally strongly opposed to charging for arbitrary things which don't actually cost us any extra to do, so I don't think there's much chance of a license change or charging.
Q. If there was one thing you could change about DMDirc what would it be?
Shane: At this time I don't think there is anything I would change.
Q. Where can users get support, information and more importantly downloads DMDirc?
Shane: There's the main website at http://www.dmdirc.com; we also have our main support channel #DMDirc on Quakenet and I idle in #DMDirc on a number of other networks (freenode, chatspike and oftc)
Chris: We're also working on some documentation for DMDirc, currently available on the wiki at http://wiki.dmdirc.com/documentation
Greg: Our website and our IRC channel, there's a link to the latter in the help menu.
Q. Anything else you would like to share with our readers?