NAME

App::Alice - an Altogether Lovely Internet Chatting Experience

SYNPOSIS

  arthur:~ leedo$ alice
  Location: http://localhost:8080/view

DESCRIPTION

Alice is an IRC client that can be run either locally or remotely, and can be viewed in multiple web browsers at the same time. The alice server maintains a message buffer, so when a browser connects it is sent the 100 most recent lines from each channel. This allows the user to close their browser while alice continues to aggregate messages.

Alice's built in web server maintains a long streaming HTTP response to each connected browser. It uses this connection to push IRC messages to the browsers in realtime. Sending messages or commands is done through an HTTP request back to alice's server.

USAGE

After installing, there should be a new `alice' command available. Run this command to start the alice server. Open your browser and connect to the URL that was printed to your terminal (likely http://localhost:8080/view). You will see a small icon in the bottom corner; this button will bring up the connection configuration window. Add one more more IRC servers and channels in this window and save. Alice will then connect to those servers, and the channels will appear as tabs at the bottom of the screen.

COMMANDS

/j[oin] [-network] $channel

Takes a channel name as an argument. It will attempt to join this channel on the server of the channel that you typed the command into.

/part

This will close the currently focused tab and part the channel. Only works on channels.

/close

/wc

Closes the current tab, even private message tabs. If used in a channel it will also part the channel.

/clear

This will clear the current tab's messages from your browser. It will also clear the tab's message buffer so when you refresh your browser the messages won't re-appear (as they normally would.)

/query $nick

Takes a nick as an argument. This will open a new tab for private messaging with a user. Only works in a channel.

/whois $nick

Takes a nick as an argument. This will print some information about the supplied user.

/quote $string

/raw $string

Sends a string as a raw message to the server.

/topic [$topic]

Takes an optional topic string. This will display the topic for the current tab. If a string is supplied, it will attempt to update the channel's topic. Only works in a channel.

/n[ames]

This will print all of the nick's in the current tab in a tabular format.

/me $string

Sends a string as an ACTION to the channel

NOTIFICATIONS

If you get a message with your nick in the body, and no browsers are connected, a notification will be sent to either Growl (if running on OS X) or using libnotify (on Linux.) Alice does not send any notifications if a browser is connected (the exception being if you are using the Fluid SSB which can access Growl). This is something that will probably become configurable over time.

RUNNING REMOTELY

Currently, there has been very little testing done for running alice remotely. So please let us know how your experience with it is.

MOBILE INTERFACE

Surprisingly, alice works very well in Mobile Safari (the browser used by the iPhone.) It still needs a little work to be fully functional, though. The required style changes are automatically applied for mobile devices.

KNOWN ISSUES

There are a number of rendering issues:

• Tabs that overflow beyond the tab row will be hidden
• Message area doesn't scroll on Firefox or Mobile Safari

AUTHORS

Lee Aylward <leedo@cpan.org>

Sam Stephenson

Ryan Baumann

Paul Robins <alice@mon.gs>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2009 by Lee Aylward <leedo@cpan.org>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.