Before my PC died I'd been working on a Game Boy emulator, an IRC bot, a simple web server, and some Lua libraries that those can all use. I guess I should get back to those... I also have shittons of projects I haven't actually worked on in a very long time, but still intend to finish eventually, like a Mario Kart 64 editor, N64 hardware dev tools (which require some components I don't have), actual website, etc...

Originally posted by Treeki

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GenericIRC: IRC client for Android. Not to boast too much, but I think this would actually be pretty awesome if I bothered finishing it. Mainly because every other IRC client for Android is horribly lacking in various ways.

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What an Android IRC client really needs is the ability to connect to a bouncer running on a PC (and that be open-source and able to run on Linux and not just a front for malware), and use a push/query protocol instead of the real IRC protocol; i.e.:
-The bouncer remains connected to the IRC server and keeps the user "connected"
-The client connects to the bouncer and messages are relayed to it as per norm, EXCEPT:
-Once the screen is turned off, the client asks to switch into "push mode" and disconnects.
-While the screen is off, the bouncer will push interesting messages (e.g. highlights) to the client. (Maybe also buffer all messages and push them to the client once every few minutes.)
-When the screen is turned back on, the client reconnects to the bouncer and downloads all the messages received in the last ~5 minutes.
The reasoning behind this is to make the IRC client work more like most IM/email clients designed for mobile (e.g. Gmail), using push notifications instead of an always-on connection. IRC clients normally maintain a constant connection to the server (with PING messages every so often to keep it alive), and that means the radio is on all the time, and this is murder on battery life.

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Originally posted by Treeki

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It would also make connection losses much less frustrating. I use AndroIRC most of the time because AndChat's CPU spikes are ridiculously irritating. Sometimes it reconnects automatically, sometimes it doesn't.

If it doesn't, then it deletes every buffer and I miss everything that happened since I last looked at the app. And if it does, it freezes the whole device for several seconds while it parses 400+ channel messages, and I have to look at every channel to see if anything's happened.

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I found that I already had to use a bouncer if I used IRC on a phone, because otherwise it'd spam disconnects and reconnects constantly when I was in areas with low signal.

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