I'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but every time I see a modern chat app I pine for the days of ICQ (as it looked in the 90's).
It had a UI I prefer over anything since - compact, comparatively unobtrusive, information-dense, and fast. I could port my full chat history around with me between machines, and also search it reliably (no vanishing scrolling or lazy-loading handicaps). And it was handy you could advertise different presence states to different people/groups.
ICQ plus Winamp was peak PC
Add mIRC 4.51 to that list. Fit a 1.44M diskette. Launched fully before you let go of the mouse button, on an old POS 486.
For sure, mIRC was the good old days. Windows 98 and houndstooth wallpaper :P.
I still use IRC to this day, just the client and the OS are different.
I suddenly feel the urge to slap something around a bit with a large trout.
Can you whip a llama’s ass with it?
Don't forget to put on your robe and wizard hat
I love this thread. We spent so much time in mIRC, about warez, weirdness but obviously tons of programming. Fun was had :)
I still use mIRC. It pretty much works like in the old days and has aged very well IMHO, I've tried other clients but none would convince me to switch. Now I even have a license (when I started using it, maybe at 15 or so, I was too broke for that).
Winamp hasn't aged so well, sadly.
mIRC scripting was one of the first languages I learn't.
First for me! xD
Ventrilo for voice chats. Finding others on Quakenet and playing 3vs3, sometimes making friends, sometimes making enemies, always having fun.
I still can't believe there isn't an open source Winamp 2.91/2.95 clone.
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?
There was x11amp, which got renamed to XMMS, which was later forked into Beep Media Player, which was later forked into Audacious.
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.
This is not what you wanted but it may not be far off, if it controls Spotify through an API I don’t see why you couldn’t extend it to control a background process for local audio.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49990730
Audacious doesn't count?
ICQ and MSN Messenger, yup. :P
It really did whip the llama’s ass.
I wonder if the 'unobstrusive, information-dense' will not die with our generation. The new guys grew up with flat and material design, plus UX design classes all about spaced typography and screens.. they will never miss what we do.
You might like the IRCv3 client I build at https://github.com/matt0x6f/irc-client. It's highly capable and modern but limited in its resource footprint and quite zippy. PRs welcome as well.
> The interface is built with React and Tailwind CSS
ಠ_ಠ
heh, I'm not sure of your particular beef with these two but I'll use this as an opportunity to explain my rationale.
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.
My beef is around your comment where you stated "limited in its resource footprint". Sure, Wails is lighter compared to Electron, but it's still not as lightweight or efficient as a native app. I personally wouldn't pitch it as a "limited resource footprint" app.
> Sure, Wails is lighter compared to Electron, but it's still not as lightweight or efficient as a native app.
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.
I'm currently connected to four networks for 6 days and 18 hours. Compared to other native apps on the same system: so, if I rewrote the application into three separate applications I could probably save ~200 MiB of memory footprint. I'll look into my ability to slim down the memory utilization but some chunk of this is probably the message buffer of each channel.The wails website says "~10MB baseline memory (vs Electron’s 100MB+)" and that sounds pretty reasonable to me. Does it bloat up badly when you start doing things?
For me, opening it. But my PC is old and not beefy enough for heavy things like react.
You forgot to say “Written in Go” /s
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.
Thank you! Would love your input
And apart from the advantages you mention, it was really configurable in terms of the level of involvement and openness you wanted. You could use it exclusively to chat with friends and otherwise be unreachable (as in MSN and their ilk later), or you could be open to chat with strangers. And you could find people by interests, I remember looking for coin collectors from countries whose coins I didn't have :)
Then MSN Messenger displaced it (at least in Spain) and it didn't have even 10% of ICQ's functionality.
Amen.
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.
I held off back in the day, for awhile but I remember my number 1202948; ICQ rocked! My sister had a much lower number and used to tease me about it, since I was the "nerd".
Proof jic https://lists.apache.org/thread/09kv8twflgo3xoh16fxl6gfkgmjk...
pff more than 6 digits!
“Uh-oh!”
And the fog horn launch sound that reminded you if your speakers were on or turned up... good times.
I was a 6 digit’er 421330, and was even able to correspond with the creators via ICQ
Mine was 29x,xxx something. I too miss ICQ.
One of the grocery stores near me actually uses that in their POS system, so you can hear it as you check out.
>information-dense
In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.
Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.
When ICQ was at its peak, users of any chat software were a rather thin layer of population. So "everybody" is more than exaggeration.
Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.
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 and AIM. Later, whatever the first Google one was. When it looked like ICQ or AIM.
It was very popular, no argument about it, especially among then youngsters. But "everybody" blows it of proportion way too much.
>ICQ was not some elite hacker thing
Sure, exactly IRC was that hacker thing.
ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.
This is type mismatch + incorrect assumptions. In 2001 ICQ went over 100 mln registered UINs. Which is not the same as "active users", it's all registrations from the inception (minus 10000 reserved). Losing UINs was a very common thing. Password recovery required email, which wasn't obligatory during registration, even if entered wasn't verified, back then few people knew what "password manager" is, and finally emails weren't particularly stable identity before gmail. But even if we would, for the sake of argument, assume the number as active users count, regular internet users by that time were numbered at more than half a billion. So even with absolutely unrealistically high estimation, ICQ share would be less than 20% of then internet population. And more realistic is probably 10-15%.
No it wasn't and it's not even close.
I never had ICQ because I was opposed to replacing open internet protocols with proprietary walled gardens governed by unaccountable private corporations imposing clickwrap contracts of adhesion on helpless users.
Definitely a regional thing. Where I grew up it was MSN Messenger all the way.
MSN Messenger was a bit after ICQ's peak
AOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.
By the time Pidgin existed I switched to something else. Maybe Jabber (today called XMPP). I don't quite remember though.
AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.
Pidgin also supported XMPP: it was a multi-protocol client. It was just a client, not a messaging system of its own. They'd abstracted the send/receive from the actual messages and built a bunch of backends that could handle pretty much any messaging protocol at the time.
ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.
Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.
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.
do you mean Trillian, the software that offered a (very themable) frontend to AIM, ICQ, yahoo and (i think) at least 3 more chat services? the awesomeness of Trillian made it obvious how useless it is for so many different services to coexist while they all offer the same value. still true today
Funny, that's always the impression I had of ICQ back in the day...
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?
> even into the broadband years
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
AIM was not around when I was using ICQ. Like, it literally didn’t exist.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
ICQ was released only 6 months before AIM, not that big of a difference. :D
yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?) At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!
Oh. Misunderstanding. I thought I was replying to a comment about IRC.
ICQ was incredibly popular amongst “normies”, at least in Brazil. Much more so than amongst nerds who were mostly still on IRC.
In Denmark it was MSN Messenger, the nerds were on IRC and also had ICQ.
MSN, mIRC and all other forms of chatting and comms (like Orkut) were also highly popular in Brazil. I guess Brazilians just like to chat.
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Discord is incredibly noisy and information-dense and while maybe not for "normies", it’s definitely not just IT guys using it. Though I wonder how many people actually like to use it.
Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set. It also helps that almost everyone I like is there. I'm forced to have whatsapp and telegram to communicate with the general population and I wouldn't use them if I didn't have to.
If someone from discord DM'd me wanting to move to telegram or whatsapp, they're automatically assumed to be a scammer.
> Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set.
It's just yahoo groups that requires your phone number.
Yes I just love its patronizingly cute little animations everywhere reminding me not to think too hard
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??
I haven't seen functionality to view multiple channels at the same time in any modern chat application, so I can't exactly blame discord for not having that.
Weechat does it: https://weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_quickstart.en.h... I don't use this feature, though.
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.
In Discord’s…defense? Description? At least for understanding—it’s gamer chat. And it’s been that from the beginning. That’s the design and the intent, and while it seems Discord-the-company is trying to adapt Discord-the-product for the increase in popularity for other uses, its roots are showing. Navigating it feels similar to navigating the menu system of a AAA game.
Yeah, I know. But they seem hell bent on adding more and more distractions in every update. I mean, it felt more manageable when it was still just a gamer chat.
I've been using it since 2016, and none of the new features that I don't use have negatively impacted me.
Also using it since their first release, and all of the new features have impeded my usage. Server nicknames are fantastic but I couldn't tell you how to access that feature. I have to relearn where that option is every single time.
Nitro, Shop, and Quests. What are these even?
Even their changelog page is wtf (https://discord.com/tags/changelog)
Right click on the server icon or header, then per-server profile. Completely reasonable to me, and I don't think it has ever not been there since they introduced it.
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.
Nitro is a subscription that gives you more customization for your profile (banners, themes, etc).
Shop is where you can buy additional customizations.
Quests get you exclusive unlocks for various games.
It's certainly dense with something. If it's information, it's not information I want though. I have no desire to know anything about their various Nitro sales or have a live feed to what my friends are playing or listening to. People I want to talk to are there, so I go there to talk to them. Anything outside of that just makes it noisy, like you said.
I can’t get into Discord. It’s just so messy and disorganized and too much information flying at my face.
It's the too much completely useless information flying at my face that I despise. So much empty space, the UI is so weirdly verbose for everything but the actual content. You need discord in full screen to manage reading messages properly. It's also slow switching channels and server.
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.
I am fine with slack (though my slack is also a disorganized mess) and used IRC at work for over a decade. Discord is at a different level with the different communities having super-duplicated functionality.
I can't understand this, it's just a name and a message. It's slack with a better threading interface. (Which is just IRC with better file transfer and image previews)
We're you on IRC? Much more information dense.
Discord is incredibly popular among younger people in general now. It escaped tech people containment years ago.
every single 'normie' i've seen use Discord can barely figure it out, they chase red badges across the UI all day and really have no clue about the paradigm at all.
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.
Is there any proof that normies would not be on board with it? Discord is information dense and huge among normies.
For the love of... can we stop saying 'normie', it's just so stupid. And intellectually lazy. And also dumb.
I’m surprised how popular Discord is for as “IT guy” and information dense the UI is tbh.