Pocket IRC is Open Source
Seeing as how the Windows Mobile platform for native C/C++ applications has effectively been killed off (at least for consumers) by Windows Phone 7 which runs only managed .NET applications, it seems like as good a time as any to release the code and maybe somebody will find some use for it or learn something from it. [I wrote this post in 2010!]
Pocket IRC’s source code is now available under an MIT license.
Pocket IRC on Windows Mobile 5
I’ve considered releasing the code for Pocket IRC before but just never gotten around to it. Probably because I always hope that I’ll get around to revitalizing it, adding those features that are always requested, and so on. And mainly because it’s just hard to let go of something that you’ve spent so many years holding on to. The code probably isn’t that great, it has a 10+ year legacy and multiple refactors and revisions, but I’m still pretty proud of it. Particularly the input bar, which is hacked into the menu bar for additional screen real-estate, and the IRC text display which I wrote from scratch, and is modeled after the mIRC display, my client of preference at the time (I use irssi on a shell now).
Allowing mouse selection with word wrapping, colours, formatting, and bottom-up aligned scrolling was a challenge, and in my opinion I ended up with the best looking, fullest featured, and fastest IRC display of any Pocket PC IRC client. This is probably the gem within the code that I’m most reluctant to let go of, as I haven’t seen any other Windows Mobile IRC client manage to surpass Pocket IRC in this regard.