Atomic

A fork for great good!

Come visit us on Freenode: #atomic-irc

Project maintained by indrora Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Atomic scratches an itch I (@indrora) had: A sexy IRC client that worked. After trying HoloIRC, AndChat, yaaic, and several others, yaaic came the closest and after pressure from friends, I decided to go ahead and fork yaaic.

So, what's different?

Since forking the project, quite a few features have been added, including but not limited to

Improved graphics
A more managed settings infrastructure
Color schemes
Generally more helpful error messages
Improved support for low-end devices
More reliance on the Android base frameworks, instead of re-inventing te wheel all the time.

Atomic can be found on IRC: We are #atomic-irc on Freenode

A little bit about Atomic

Desperation is the mother of invention.

I wanted a working IRC client for Android. Unfortunately, at the time (early 2014) there was no good IRC clients that I really felt fit the strange requirements I had put in place:

Had to be Open-source software
Had to have support for SSL
Had to have moderate support for bouncers (namely ZNC)
Had to have some degree of customization that actually made sense.
Had to work on Gingerbread.

At the time, my daily driver was a Motorola Triumph running CM7. This was not by any stretch of the imagination a "powerful" phone: Simple games were fine, and I could at least play GBA roms on it. Sometimes, if I held it right. For a $100 phone, it worked great however, and it was what got me to really dig my heels into Android development. I started writing simple things and actually got into the flow of what it looks to be an Android developer. My first from-source build of Android was for that phone.

Nothing fits perfectly. Ever

When I tried out IRC clients on it, I constantly felt like I was fighting not only the hardware, but the ideas on which those IRC clients were founded. HoloIRC was by far beautiful, but fell short when the author didn't really care that his software didn't run terribly great on anything that wasn't at least a dual-core device with Jellybean or above on it. AndChat was focused as well on features, but not so much functionality. It was slow and bloated on my little 300MB-of-ram device. I frequently saw it run out of memory and go "oops!".

When I came across yaaic, I thought "Self, this looks like a good place to start. It has a nice interface (despite some not liking the new version), and it seems to have most of the features you want. Why not extend it?" So after much cadjoling by my peers, I forked the project, renamed it, and immediately went off and did something useful with my time. One of the first things I did was easy: Change up the icons and make things look good for what they are. I made sure it still ran on that dinky single-core phone and that it also ran right on other devices, like Nooks and Androidx86 targets.