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| Klient |
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Current Version: 2.2.1
Klient is an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) application for Windows.
Klient features a modern customizable interface, multiple server support, highly robust scripting, external .dll support, and much more!
Screenshots shown are of Klient 2.1 on Windows XP running the standard XP theme (updated 16-July-2005).
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| Klient v2.2 |
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Klient 2.2.3 Now Available
Saturday, January 3rd 2009 by tom
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Klient 2.2.3 is now available. There was an issue with the short-lived 2.2.2 release, which is my fault and due to inadequate testing.
Note:If you did install Klient 2.2.2, the 2.2.3 installer may not want to upgrade 2.2.2 to 2.2.3. In this case, you can download this file and replace your Klient.exe and KlientObject.dll with the contents in the zip file.
The problem was related to the installer, not the program, but was related to Klient's infamous "crack detection". Rather than spending the the time to diagnose and fix the problem, I just removed the crack detection (it was set with a compiler directive so removing it was very easy).
Yes, this means no more crack detection. My goal was to have the registrations cover my own expenses with the virtual server, but these days registerations don't cover that cost anyway. No, its not a good sign for the future of this project because I can't pay for it out of my own pocket forever (and I don't trust the many "I'll host it for a free registration" requests from fly-by-night virtual servers) and the fact that its a financial liability means it can't be my top priority in life. But, that is what it is and its been that way for a long time. In the meantime, a false positive on the crack detection is the last thing I want to do to legimately registered users.
So, here is a release that will never have that problem. Hacker types have a blast. This one will be easy. Hopefully between now and the release of 3.0 more people will learn to appreciate Klient over mIRC :)
2.2.1 through 2.2.3 is a minor update to fix some annoying display problems on Vista. If you aren't running Vista, you won't notice a difference.
Read More...
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| Klient 3.0 |
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Klient 3.0 Update
Tuesday, June 23rd 2009 by tom
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It's been a while since a progress report. In my last update I had just started worked on the various option dialogs. I worked on that a lot through the end of February then got away from it for a while. I came back to it and worked on it quite a bit more. Wow there is a lot of UI work involved in setting options!
The option dialogs aren't quite done yet; they are probably about 70% complete. But, I got a little bored with that and moved on to something else for a while. Lately I've been coding a part whose absence has held me up in other areas: the new display window. That's another area where there has been a lot of previous discussion and debate regarding possible new features.
In the new version, my primary concern is speed, adding the ability to support a few key features such as user-defined graphics for emoticons, support for UTF8 with the ability to toggle between ASCII and UTF8 on the fly, and making sure it doesn't have some of the quirks of the previous display window (such as not being able to detect hyperlinks that have color/font codes embedded in them).
It isn't quite done yet, but already all of these goals are met. The rest is a bit techy but some people might be interested...
With regard to speed, its parsing routines are significantly faster than Klient 2. That is due in part to a new tweaked-out algorithm that does everything in a single pass without modifying strings. "everything" includes parsing color and font style codes, parsing hyperlinks, parsing emoticons, and parsing custom highlights (defined in the highlight options). The speed improvement is also due in part to taking advantage of multiple processors and/or cores and a near linear speedup per processor/core was achieved.
The exact difference in speed between the K2 and the K3 parsing depends on the contents of the text (how many color codes, hyperlinks, highlights, etc.) and improves with lines that have more. On my 2-year-old dual core laptop, it ranges from 7x faster for simple lines (60 characters in words of 4 characters each with no color codes, hyperlinks, or text to highlight) to 20x faster for slightly more complex lines (140 characters total, including 10 color codes, 1 web hyperlink, 1 email hyperlink, 1 channel hyperlink, 1 whole-word-only highlight match and 1 not-whole-word-only highlight match). The more of that type of complexity that appears in the text, the faster it is compared to K2.
With all of that said, being able to parse 2,000,000 lines per second vs. 100,000 isn't something one can observe real-world effects of, as text just doesn't come in that fast from an IRC server. The significance of the speedup is that it can now do the parsing on-the-fly, as the lines are painted, instead of relying on pre-parsed data to exist for each line. That reduces memory consumption (in general the .NET app hogs more than the Delphi app, but the memory used for what I'm discussing here is why K2's default window buffer size was only 1000 lines). It also makes a dramatic difference in speed when displays are updated because the display options or highlight options change. In K2, if you have many windows open with a lot of text in their buffers (even the relatively low default of 1000 lines), clicking "OK" in the display options dialog results in an hour glass cursor for a while as displays are updated. That won't be the case in K3.
ok, this wasn't the most exciting update ever. But, this was a complex piece of code that was holding me back from being able to continue working on other areas so it's good to have it almost done. |
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Klient 3.0 Update
Tuesday, June 23rd 2009 by tom
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Sorry... this was originally posted December 30, 2008. I updated the priority so I could add a new item on top of it and it automatically changed the date with no way to reset it.
Klient 3.0 is still in the works. Here is some updated information including some screen shots. Some of this is excerpts from a thread in the support forum.
Overview
Klient 3.0 is all-new. The 2.x Delphi line of code is being scrapped. Klient 3.0 is being developed in Visual Studio 2008 using C# and version 3.5 of the .NET Framework.
Plugin support is through .NET assemblies which can be written in any language for which there is a .NET compiler. For scripting with the built-in script editor, Klient 3.0 natively compiles C#, VB.NET, JScript.NET, and J#. These scripts and plugins have a new and rich library to work with, as Klient 3.0 exposes much more to scripts than previous versions.
Klient 3.0 will still support ActiveX-based scripting with the Windows Script Host like previous versions. Thus, all of the current languages (VBScript, JScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.) will still be supported.
Klient 3.0 has UTF-8 support from the ground up. Actually, all of the underlying code is entirely independant of the encoding. While it is unlikely that anything other than UTF-8 will be used because the IRC protocol uses spaces and colons (prohibiting 32 and 58 as any byte of any multi-byte character), Klient itself no longer cares. All processing is done at the level of the byte arrays. This support is passed through to scripts and plugins which have access to the underlying byte arrays as well. However, to keep things simple for scripters who don't care to delve that deeply into it, they can access standard strings as well (converted from the byte arrays using the encoding known to be in use).
All configuration settings are stored in XML files. The registry is no longer used. For some reason this was a big issue for some people.
K3 makes good use of multiple processors. With most newer computers having dual-core and quad-core processors it's worth it to put some focus on that. To tweak performance, in some areas it even checks the processor count and uses different algorithms accordingly (otherwise the multi-threading could actually degrade performance).
Virtually every dialog and concept has improvements scattered about but that would be a long list. These are just a few of the major points I can think of off the top of my head.
Eye Candy
Since so many people are more interested in what it looks like than anything else, I thought I would post some screen shots. Klient 3.0 has a theme engine and will come installed with many themes. Custom themes can be developed as well. Themes can be enabled for just the main window and windows like it (but not dialog-type windows) or for everything. Or, they can be turned off. If they are turned off, there are options similar to K2 for the appearance of the toolbars and docks.
These screen shots were taken on Windows Vista.
Here is the K3 main window shown in the "Black" theme.
Here is the List Management window using the standard windows themes. Note that it is on Vista with themes enabled, so in this case it is similar to the XP "silver" theme. The navigation control on the left (not sure what to call it, its a control I wrote myself) can be turned on or off in exchange for a standard XP explorer bar control.
Here is the theming being carried through to dialogs:
Add Ban dialog with Klient's themes disabled (but standard Windows theming enabled)
Add Ban dialog with the black theme
And, to give an example of interesting theme possibilities:
Add Ban dialog with the Christmas theme
In the next few weeks I may post an .exe to solicit feedback on the new options dialog(s). There was a lot of talk in the forums over how K2 handled network-specific options and its level of difficulty in configuring. What I've come up with for K3 is very different but I think it will address those concerns.
That's all for now. Sorry, I have no idea when it will be ready for release or even beta testing. |
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