IRC Clients for Mac–not many, but my bewilderment abounds.

I have currently loaded and operating on my MacBook three IRC clients: X-Chat Aqua, IRCle, and Colloquy.  I have been tasked with the job of selecting the best, or barring that selecting one.  The latter I can certainly do.  Eenie, meenie, meinee. . .   Ah, fuggit.  I can’t do that.  I wrote gadget reviews for three years, many thousands of them.  I have to have an opinion, an informed one.

Well, I got onto our assigned server and channel fairly easily with all three.  IRCle took me the longest because it has a separate window for servers and channels, and when I opened it up, it was in a weird default and lay only partially within the bounds of my screen.  I dragged it into the center when I saw it–after I had tried to figure out how to enter the server info for ten minutes.  “OH!  Duh!” there it is. . .  I suppose that IRCle might be my last choice, for this reason and because it’s not clear if it is continuing to be updated and supported.  The last post as to  it was almost a year ago, and the current version was made for Tiger, there is an Alpha for Leopard, but I don’t have time for that junk ATM.

Comparing the chat displays for the three, Colloquy is my clear favorite.  IRCle and X-Chat have that Unix style ascii scrolling text that makes me feel like ants are nesting in my frontal lobe.  Colloquy automatically highlights links and applies different colors to text and user attributions, making reading entries much more brain and eye friendly.

So I suppose I have made a choice, however arbitrary it may be.