IRC on the iPhone

July 5, 2007

Oh yes.

On my Blackberry Pearl, I had been using jmIrc to connect to irc and chat. This was one of the things I missed when I got my iPhone. Thanks to the fine folks behind Colloquy, I now can do this on the iPhone:

The trick is to use the Web Interface Add-In which has been updated for the iPhone. Here are the steps taken directly from colloquy.info:

1. Download
2. Install in ~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns
3. Set a password with this command: defaults write info.colloquy WebInterfacePassword yourpassword
4. Open or relaunch Colloquy.
5. Visit http://yourip:6667 on your iPhone.
6. Enter your password.

Once you’ve connected, you’ll be presented with a list of channels configured in Colloquy on your Mac. It’s that easy. Input doesn’t seem to work reliably (at the moment) in landscape mode, but it works fine in standard mode. All in all, it is very useful and fairly stable. On busy IRC channels, the updating can be a bit behind, but it catches up pretty fast on a Wifi connection. I have yet to test it on EDGE since my setup is completely internal at the moment. I’m happy with what I see, especially with private messages and the members list. Here are a few more pictures: